{"id":760086,"date":"2020-04-02T09:24:56","date_gmt":"2020-04-02T13:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=760086"},"modified":"2020-04-02T09:35:23","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T13:35:23","slug":"first-you-eat-meat-then-meat-eats-you-covid-19-shows-that-what-were-doing-to-animals-is-killing-us-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=760086","title":{"rendered":"‘First you eat meat, then meat eats you’: Covid-19 shows that what we’re doing to animals is killing us, too"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Scientists estimate that animals carry more than 600,000 unknown viruses with the potential to jump to humans. About 2\/3 of infectious diseases and almost all epidemics came from eating animals.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

VIVECA MORRIS:<\/strong> The growing body of scientific research is clear: Diseases like COVID-19 are an expected consequence of how we\u2019re choosing to treat animals and their habitats. By changing the nature and frequency of human-animal interactions, our actions \u2014 through the wildlife trade, deforestation, land conversion, industrial animal farming, the burning of fossil fuels, and more \u2014 propel the emergence and transmission of novel and known human infectious diseases… About two-thirds of emerging infectious diseases in humans \u2014 including COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, Zika, H1N1, cholera and almost all recent epidemics \u2014 came from animals. And 70% of those originated in wildlife…<\/p>\n

Scientists suspect that COVID-19, like SARS, is caused by a coronavirus that jumped from bats to humans (perhaps via pangolins or another kind of animal) at a live animal market in Wuhan, China. In these markets, an ark\u2019s worth of animals that rarely encounter one another in the wild are crammed together in stacked cages as they await sale and slaughter. \u201cYou have a bird pooping on a turtle that poops on a civet,\u201d Dr. Christian Walzer of the Wildlife Conservation Society told The New York Times. \u201cFor getting new viruses to emerge, you couldn\u2019t do it much better even if you tried”…<\/p>\n

And then we have the bio-catastrophes that are modern factory farms. We pack most of the world\u2019s livestock animals, for all or part of their lives, into crammed living conditions that are hotbeds for viral and bacterial pathogens, and then we lace their feed with the world\u2019s most medically important antibiotics, creating perfect conditions for antibiotic-resistant pathogens to develop…<\/p>\n

To date, we\u2019ve operated under the fallacies that medicine and ecology can be understood independently and that the conditions that impact the animal kingdom are separate from those that impact humans. COVID-19 exposes these fallacies. Scientists estimate that animals carry more than 600,000 unknown viruses with the potential to jump to humans. How often these diseases have the opportunity to make the jump, and how prepared we are for them, is up to us.\u00a0 SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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