Sorry Meat Eaters: Eating Animals Did Cause the Coronavirus Outbreak.
Wet Markets vs Factory Farming — Why rebuke one and uphold the other?
Saturday, May 30th — More than 6 million cases of COVID-19 have been recorded globally. In the wake of it all, we yearn for a return to normalcy. However, a return to the way things were is the last thing we should desire, as the pre-COVID-19 setting is exactly what got us here. We must return to a different world, one in which we can reasonably prevent such pandemics from recurring and having an even more devastating impact than COVID-19.
To prevent future pandemics, we must begin at the cause of the current one. Many have pointed a finger at the wet markets of Wuhan, China as the start of the spread. What about the wild animals sold there could have led to such a global catastrophe?
To find out, let us wind the clock back to the beginning of 2020 — what feels like years ago, but is only a few month's time.
It is February 24th, 2020, and China has just declared an immediate ban on the trade and consumption of wild animals after evidence points to a wet market in Wuhan being the most likely place COVID-19 spilled over to humans. Soon after, the southern city of Shenzhen goes a step further, extending the ban to dogs and cats.
The 2003 SARS epidemic, caused by human interaction with pangolins, saw no change in wildlife trade legislation. This time, China’s swift action to close the wet markets seems to provide a glimmer of hope for a changing world.
However, this change is short-lived, as less than a month after taking steps to permanently ban the trade and consumption of wild animals, the ban is lifted.
Moreover, the Chinese government begins promoting Tan Re Qing, an injection containing bear bile, to treat critical COVID-19 cases.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring nation of Vietnam, black cats are being boiled alive, skinned, cooked into a paste, and sold as medicine to combat COVID-19. Given that the World Health Organization states that no cure exists for COVID-19, such animal-derived medicines and injections are entirely unnecessary.
China’s decision to reopen the wet markets is met with both public rebuke and a fair bit of xenophobia. A storm of calls from western countries shames China for this return to normalcy. Australia even puts pressure on China to look into the health risks associated with wildlife markets as the world continues to battle against the pandemic.
Three months pass, and it is now the beginning of June. COVID-19 has created a fiery debate over wildlife markets on the international stage. Yet what is it intrinsically about our contact with wild-animals that makes the interaction so lethal? Most of us interact with animals on a daily basis, after all, multiple times a day. Each time we put a piece of meat, eggs, dairy, or any other animal product in our mouth, we are coming in contact with other animals. This begs the question, what is the key difference between wet markets and factory farms — between wild animals and farmed animals — that makes the former so despicable and the latter completely acceptable?
“The CDC warns that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals, while the WHO, FAO, and OIE have previously stated that increased demand for animal protein is one of the main risk factors of a pandemic.”
While recent debates and conversations focus on wild-animal consumption, little has been said about farm-animal consumption. Yet how can we forget that most modern-day viruses and diseases, such as avian flu, Ebola, HIV, swine flu, SARS, and vCJD, all jumped to humans after close contact with other species — the type of close contact that is widespread in factory farming?
We subject factory farmed animals to conditions that are the exact opposite of what is recommended we do to prevent disease.
Factory farming creates perfect conditions for the proliferation of disease: The stress and unsanitary conditions of factory farms weaken animals’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to infection. Overcrowding allows the disease to spread quickly and easily, and over time, antibiotics cause resistant strains of bacteria to evolve.
The CDC states that any form of contact, direct or indirect, in the form of “coming into contact with the saliva, blood, urine, mucous, feces, or other body fluids of an infected animal” and “areas where animals live and roam, or objects or surfaces that have been contaminated with germs” allows for the transmission of zoonotic diseases.
Just a quick glance inside a factory farm will show the putrid conditions that animals are forced to live in. And yet, ironically, the CDC continues to encourage viewing animals, the same animals that come out of these factory farms, as benefits that “provide food” and other essentials.
Chickens, the most commonly consumed animal in the US, have less than one square foot of space per bird. Modern broiler operations grow their birds to be so obese that their limbs cannot hold the weight of their bodies. These birds spend their lives sitting in feces. Animals regularly get sick, injured, and even die as a result of these miserable conditions. Modern factory farms provide continuous low doses of antibiotics to billions of livestock, both for disease prevention and for rapid weight gain. This creates the perfect conditions for breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
We go to the grocery markets with our mask pulled tight and our body ready to veer a 6-ft radius around anyone else. Yet we casually stack meat, eggs, and milk into our carts without considering the diseases they may spread to us.
Just a few weeks ago, an infectious and fatal strain of bird flu was confirmed in a commercial turkey flock in South Carolina, the first case of the more serious strain of the disease that last emerged in 2017 in the United States in chicken factories. In 2015, an estimated 50 million chickens were mass buried alive as a way to efficiently dispose of them after infections spread throughout the region.
With Ag-Gag laws in place, it is a crime to even go inside farms, breeding facilities, and slaughterhouses to view these conditions. There is a reason why many of us never see the slaughtering process — why it never crosses our minds. It would be a shock to almost anyone to know that 80% of pigs have pneumonia. How could our government continue to subsidize and promote animal products when there are so many atrocious health risks involved?
Two trillion-dollar industries, the Animal Agriculture industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, both have vested interests in the continued sale and consumption of animal products. Around 80% of the antibiotics used in the United States are not given to sick humans, but to animals in factory farms. By purchasing and consuming animal products, we are at high risk of antibiotic resistance, and thus at a higher risk of being defenseless in the face of future disease outbreaks. While we criticize other countries for cruel and disgusting practices, we turn a blind eye to the crumbling food systems in our own country.
Unless we change now, it is inevitable that we are setting ourselves up for a series of pandemics in the near future. If not for the sake of animal cruelty, then for the sake of human livelihood, we must remove animal products from our lives.
