At the Beilaide pigeon farm in Zhaoqing, more than 120,000 pigeons have been slaughtered because of slow sales in the past week.

Li Yuzhen, an executive at the farm, said they had lost more than 2 million yuan in the past week.

"We would have had to feed the pigeons more than 20 tons of feed, about 80,000 yuan a day, if we hadn't slaughtered them," she said.

In Guangzhou, workers from the bureau of animal sanitation buried 38 live and 12 dead chicks in the city's Huadu district on Saturday.

City personnel quickly arrived on the scene when residents reported that the chicks and bodies were found dumped in the district's Gongye'erlu area of the Furong Industrial Zone.

Peng Cong, director of Guangzhou office of animal sanitation, was quoted by New Express Daily on Sunday as saying that it was not yet known whether the chicks carried H7N9 virus because the testing has not been completed.

Peng said he believed the ill chicks were dumped by locals.

According to the Guangdong Center for Disease Control and Prevention, no H7N9 cases or other unknown cases of pneumonia have been reported in the province.

None of the 542 workers in Guangdong's poultry industry who were asked to take a sample test for H7N9 virus between April 1 and 12 were diagnosed as having H7N9 bird flu virus.

Only a pregnant woman was detected to have contracted H1N1 virus flu in the Guangzhou's Huadu district in the past week.