Animal Farming & The Next Pandemic — Closer Than You Think

INTRODUCTION

On 30th December 2019, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist from Wuhan Central Hospital in the Hubei province of China, alerted his colleagues about a number of mysterious “pneumonia” cases discovered in the city the previous week. His initial message read “7 cases of SARS confirmed at Huanan Seafood Market”. 17 years earlier, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) had been the first globally lethal outbreak triggered by a coronavirus. In response, however, Dr Wenliang was reprimanded by local police for “spreading rumours” and “making false statements that disturbed the public order”. 39 days later, he died from the very virus he warned everyone about. Unfortunately by that time, the disease had already spread to dozens of countries, and is now famously known as COVID-19.

 

How did we end up here?

 

After the eradication of smallpox in the late 1940s, we rejoiced for the fact that we have gone past the era of infectious disease.

 

Boy were we wrong.

 

Little did we know that the COVID-19 pandemic actually stemmed from the very industry that helped put food on our dinner plates: animal farming.

 

Hundreds of years ago, animals roamed freely in the wilderness. Now, we genetically modify them for food, and compress them in factories with barely enough space to wiggle around. This makes disease outbreaks inevitable, further justified by the fact that 70% of zoonotic diseases come from wildlife. 

 

But how and when did we start farming animals in the first place? 

ANIMAL FARMING IN CHINA: THE HISTORY OF HOW IT ALL STARTED

After former communist chairman, Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” ended in 1962, China was on the verge of collapse. Disastrous famine and chaos from the Cultural Revolution killed millions. Farmlands and food production which were once controlled by the Chinese communist government failed to feed its 900 million people. In 1978, the regime had no other choice but to give up this control and reopened the doors to private farming. Large companies started monopolizing popular food production such as pork and poultry. Realizing they had no chance against the big dogs, small-time farmers turned to catching and raising wild animals instead, in order to sustain themselves.

 

Initially, farming wild animals was mostly done in small scales among peasant households, such as backyard operations of turtles. But as the business slowly grew and gradually lifted the people out of poverty, the Chinese government decided to back it. In 1988, they enacted the “Wildlife Protection Law”, whereby the animals are stated as “resources owned by the state”. The law also protected people engaged in the “utilization of wildlife resources” (Article 3), which meant that these wild animals can be used for human benefits. In Article 17, it encouraged the domestication and breeding of wildlife. With that, the wildlife trade industry emerged.

 

There was a vast expansion of wildlife trade in the 1990s to supply the demands of the emerging urban Chinese middle-class. Freshly slaughtered animals are thought to be more nutritious by many regional customers, and some seek ye wei (“wild taste”), believing the consumption of exotic animals bestows benefits to health and social status. These animals entered China through Vietnam from Laos, typically while still alive. This industry rose to become the second-largest income source for rural families, and six million people are now involved in China’s wildlife farming industry, which is valued at $18 billion.

 

But as others wanted to get a hand in this newfound wealth, more people started undercutting government regulations. The industry is taken underground as endangered animals such as rhinoceroses, tigers and pangolins are smuggled illegally into markets. With profit being the main driver, proper sanitation, on the other hand, becomes a nuisance. Unfortunately, this greed has led to one of the biggest pandemic of the 21st century.

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO COVID-19

Coronaviruses are named after the Latin word corona, which means “crown” due to its crown-like spikes radiating from the surface. Examples of significant coronavirus outbreaks throughout our lifetime was the SARS in 2002, with a 10% mortality rate, killing 1 in every 10 people infected. On the other hand, MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) has a 1 in 3 mortality rate. COVID-19 is the third deadly human coronavirus to emerge since the turn of the century. But from where exactly did these infectious diseases come from?

Most human coronaviruses appear to have arisen originally in bats, who are considered the primordial hosts — the “gene pool” or reservoir from which genetic fragments of coronaviruses can mix and match. But in order to infect humans, these viruses need an intermediate host in whom coronaviruses can adapt, amplify and access human populations.

For SARS, it was the masked palm civet, a catlike animal prized for its meat, the purported aphrodisiac qualities of its penis and the taste imparted to coffee beans they are fed to confer a scent from their perianal glands. Researchers have said that although fully cooked civet meat is probably safe, people could become infected while handling the animals during breeding, slaughter or preparation.

In the case of MERS, the intermediary host were farmed camels. A bat in Saudi Arabia was found carrying the MERS coronavirus, but it is in contact with the bodily fluids of infected camels — particularly their nasal secretions — that is considered the major risk factor for human infection. But we domesticated camels three thousand years ago. Why is the outbreak only happening now?

Archived samples of camel blood showed MERS had long been circulating in them for decades before spilling over into the human population. Camels used to be allowed to forage and graze outdoors, but as we started farming them, they were forced to be enclosed in high-density housing systems where they were confined indoors. In 2011, open grazing was completely banned in Qatar, the Middle Eastern country with the largest camel density. The next year, the first human cases of MERS were reported.

The presence of SARS-like coronavirus reservoirs in bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a ticking time bomb. A time bomb that just went off.

 

According to the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic was the Huanan Market in Wuhan, China. Described as the largest wholesale seafood market in Central China, the Hua’nan Market reportedly sold 75 species of wild animals. More than 90% of the samples that turned up positive for the virus were found in the section of the half-million-square-foot seafood market that trafficked in exotic animals sold for food.

The leading suspect for the current outbreak is the scaly anteaters: pangolin.

 

Between the demand for their meat as a delicacy and their scales for use in traditional medicines, pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world. They are served in high-end restaurants in China. And coronavirus found in diseased pangolins that were smuggled from Malaysia into China was found to be 90% identical with the COVID-19 virus.

 

Ironically, what started out as traditional medicine for human health turned out to kill millions worldwide, creating the worst plague in humanity.

HOW IT ALL STARTED — ATTACK OF THE VIRUS

“I had a little bird,

Its name was Enza,

I opened the window,

And in-flu-enza”.

— A children’s rhyming poem

The word “epidemic” comes from the Greek word epi, meaning “upon”, and demos, meaning “people”. The word “pandemic” comes from the Greek word pandemos, meaning “upon all the people”.

1918 saw one of the biggest pandemics of our time — the Spanish Influenza, which had gone to kill 50 to 100 million people worldwide. Influenza, or in simpler terms, “flu”, used to be a common and harmless disease affecting our respiratory tract causing typical viral symptoms such as fever, muscle aches, dry cough and a runny nose. In fact, up to 60 million Americans come down with the flu every year. But how did it turned to be so deadly, as it did in 1918?

 

Historically, avian (or bird) flu viruses have existed harmlessly for millions of years as harmless intestinal viruses in aquatic birds, such as ducks — the natural reservoir and original source of all influenza viruses. Over the years, the virus silently multiplies in the intestinal lining of ducks, is secreted out into the pond water, is swallowed up by another duck, and the cycle continues. The virus doesn’t cause harm. In fact, it is in the virus’s evolutionary best interest not to make the duck sick, because otherwise, a dead duck couldn’t fly far and pass down its genes onto the next duck.

But how did this virus come into contact with humans to become deadly? It began 4,500 years ago when we started to domesticate ducks.

 

Duck farming intensified over the last 500 years, beginning during the Ching Dynasty in China in 1644 A.D. Farmers moved ducks from rivers onto their flooded rice fields to help control weeds and pests. This led to a year-round gene pool of avian influenza viruses in East Asia having close proximity to humans. This is probably why two of the last three flu pandemics started in China.

The last few centuries saw the rise of live bird markets, whereby all types of birds such as ducks, geese and chickens are stacked in cages on top of one another in unnatural stocking densities, and were raised under poor sanitation before being transported to markets for sale. Animals at the bottom of these cages were often soaked with all kinds of liquids from countless of species: animal urine, faeces, pus and blood. This provided the perfect cauldron of potential contagion, which makes mass disease outbreaks inevitable.

Here, ducks already infected with this waterborne, intestinal virus could be transmitted easily to land-based, terrestrial birds such as chickens via faecal route. But in order to jump into a new species, the virus has to mutate and adapt in its new host, or else it would die. In caged chickens, viruses do not have the luxury of easy waterborne transmission as in ponds. So it has to use the next best mode of transmission in order to spread its genes: airborne. From the intestine, the virus would find itself in the lungs of chickens, as it mutate and adapt in its new host, before jumping onto the next one. Interestingly, avian influenza goes into chickens as an aquatic virus, but may come out as an avian flu.

 

And as these viruses adapt to terrestrial birds, they also adapt to terrestrial mammals such as ourselves. In people, the virus must make us sick in order to spread. It does this by creating inflammation in our lungs, causing us to cough and shoot out the virus from one person to the next. That’s why face masks are crucial to prevent this transmission.

Many of the greatest plagues in history arise when we bridled with these animals. We never had influenza until we domesticated waterfowls. We never had measles, typhoid or tuberculosis until we domesticated livestock.

 

The 1918 Spanish Flu was believed to have started in a chicken farm in Kansas. In 1980s, mad cow disease occurred when we started cannibalising cows — by feeding cows with dead cow meat. In 2002, SARS was traced back to farmed civet cats from wet markets in China; H1N1 swine flu in 2009 was linked to a pig farm in North Carolina; MERS in 2012 was related to intensive camel farming in Middle East; bird flu strains such as H5N1 and H7N9 in Asia came from poultry farms and live birds markets; AIDS was the result of the bush meat trade in Africa from killing chimpanzees; Nipah virus in Malaysia came from pig farms; and now COVID-19 with a 0.5% fatality rate, emerged from the wet markets of Wuhan, China.

 

Even so, COVID-19 might just be a dress-rehearsal for what is about to come next. Because think about it: what does all these pandemics have in common? They occur when we started breeding these animals to meet our growing demand for meat, which has tripled in the last 50 years.

 

Forget bioterrorism or vaccine microchip conspiracies. Our own factory farms could actually cause the next pandemic.

ANIMAL FARMING: THE CULPRIT OF THIS PANDEMIC (AND THE NEXT ONE)

Today, livestocks such as chickens, pigs or cows are raised in what is called “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)”. CAFOs are huge industrialized farming operations. They are crowded with tens or hundreds of thousands of animals, and are built for one purpose: To cut down production cost as much as possible, by housing tonnes of animals in one space, with barely enough legroom for these animals to move around (or even to turn around). As it turns out, CAFOs are the modus operandi for the livestock industry globally.

These animals spend their entire lives eating, sleeping and defecating in the same cramped quarters, breathing in particles of their neighbours’ waste and the stinging ammonia of decomposing faeces. Their first breath of fresh air is on the truck to the slaughter plant. The air is choked with fecal dust and ammonia, which irritates the animals’ respiratory passages, further increasing susceptibility in these animals whose immunities are already weakened by the stress of confinement.

 

Before CAFOs were the default in farming, viruses must replicate and mutate insidiously and harmlessly in a duck’s intestine. A strong and deadly strain would kill the duck, making it unable to spread its viral genes to other ducks. But when these birds are placed in environments such as CAFOs, it does not matter how deadly the virus wants to be. In fact, even a dead chicken can still spread the disease to its neighbour, which is apparently, just a beak’s away.

 

Long-distance live animal transport has also been blamed for the cause of rapid viral dissemination. Thanks to the advancement in transportation, a lethal virus can travel all over the world without any restrictions.

 

For land-scarce Singapore, more than 90% of the country’s food had to be imported from 170 countries worldwide over the last 2 years. Brazil is considered its major source of supply of beef, chicken and pork despite the huge geographic distance apart. In 2018, Singapore imported more than 126,000 tonnes of pork. Today, 600 pigs are transported from a pig farm in Sarawak to Singapore via a 48-hour ship trip.

China, on the other hand, accounts for 70% of the world’s tonnage of duck meat and more than 90% of global goose meat. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), China is the largest producer of chicken, duck, and goose meat for human consumption, and has more than two dozen species of waterfowl.

“China represents the most incredible reassortment laboratory for influenza viruses that anyone could ever imagine.”

— Michael Osterholm, the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota

DARK TRUTHS BEHIND CHINA’S WILDLIFE TRADE

By 2004, the wildlife-farming industry was worth an estimated $100 billion yuan, and it exerted significant influence over the Chinese government. The wildlife farming industry was tiny in China’s gigantic GDP, but the industry has enormous lobbying capability. This influence has encouraged the Chinese government to allow these markets to grow over the years.

 

In 2016, for example, the government sanctioned the farming of some endangered species like tigers and pangolins.

 

By 2018, the wildlife industry had grown to $148 billion yuan and had developed clever marketing tactics to keep the markets around. The industry has been promoting these wildlife animals as tonic products, as body-building, sex-enhancing, and ironically, as disease-fighting. None of these claims, however, are backed by scientific data.

What’s surprising is that, in reality, the majority of the people in China do not eat wildlife animals. The truth is, those who consume these animals are the rich and the powerful — China’s small minority. It’s these minority that the Chinese government choose to favor over the safety of the rest of its 1.4 billion population.

 

“For market buyers, frogs are a common and inexpensive wildlife dish”, says Peter Li, China policy specialist at Humane Society International and professor in East Asian politics at the University of Houston-Downtown. “On the high end, only the rich can afford soup made with palm civet, fried cobra, or braised bear paw”, he added. “This parochial commercial interest of a small number of wildlife eaters are hijacking China’s national interest”.

WILL BANNING WILDLIFE TRADE PREVENT FUTURE PANDEMICS?

At the height of 2002 SARS epidemic, the Chinese government issued a temporary ban on the wildlife trade. Six months later, it lifted the ban, allowing breeding facilities of 54 wildlife species to resume business as usual, with claims that, “Wildlife breeding and trading is a healthy industry as long as we follow scientific technologies and strict administration”.

 

Dr. Zhou Jinfeng, the director-general of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, has been very vocal in calling for a ban. Zhou says some farmers claim that their animals were bred legally in captivity for conservation, but then sell them to markets or collectors. He said to move forward, three basic changes were needed:

 

(i) “Public participation and whistle-blowing have played a crucial role in the past years. Law enforcement needs to take these reports seriously”.

(ii) Social organizations “should be authorized to sue the local governments for failing to perform their duties and dereliction of duty”.

(iii) “There must be accountability mechanism” as he said there were government officials who are complicit in illegal wildlife trading.

 

Zhou noted that some bushmeat market businesses and online trading platforms use certain licenses to make the meat they’re selling look “farmed” when in fact the animals are actually wild-sourced.

 

As the COVID-19 virus started to take the world by storm in early 2020, China is reportedly amending the “Wildlife Protection Law” that encouraged wildlife farming decades ago. Stopping the sale of wild animals appears to have the support of many Chinese people, some of whom have taken to social media to deplore the trade. Many are indignant that a wildlife market is the likely source of the coronavirus.

HOW TO PREVENT FUTURE PANDEMICS

Eliminating cages of farm animals won’t guarantee that we’ll prevent the next global pandemic, but it’s a huge step in the right direction. This industry is evidently a public health menace, so what are the possible solutions to tackle the issue? These are just some of them:

 

First, the food industry should accelerate it’s movement away from its reliance on meat, eggs and dairy, in favor of putting plant-based foods front and centre. We already know eating plant-based foods can lower the risk of chronic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, cancer and heart disease. It’s not only beneficial to our dietary health, but it will also reduce the need to raise farm animals by the billions and risk future zoonotic disease outbreaks. This crisis has been a global nightmare, but there is hope on the horizon. No longer are these plant-based meat options just some kind of niche market for vegetarians. Some of the biggest meat producers in the world — Tyson, Perdue, Smithfield — just released an entirely plant-based line of products. Ultimately, they are just in the business of making money.

“Individually, we must stop eating animal products. Collectively, we must transform the global food system and work toward ending animal agriculture and rewilding much of the world. Oddly, many people who would never challenge the reality of climate change refuse to acknowledge the role meat-eating plays in endangering public health. Eating meat, it seems, is a socially acceptable form of science denial”.

— Political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz, author Astra Taylor, and environmental historian Troy Vettese

The next big thing could be this: cultivated meat. By growing meat from muscle cells in laboratories, we don’t have to worry about fecal pathogens like E. coli or salmonella because the meat is made without guts. We don’t have to worry about respiratory viruses because they are made without the lungs. Although they are not necessarily healthy personal choices, but from a pandemic risk standpoint, it has zero risk.

 

And the end of the day, it’s all about changing consumer’s mindset. The solution lies in changing people’s minds about what is delicious, trendy, prestigious or healthy to eat. Fortunately, there has been tremendous changes. For example, shark fin soup used to be a very popular dish, but a number of conservation groups worked very hard to change the mindset of people. Now, shark fin soup went from a prestigious dish into being a stigma. However, no amount of law matters if there is a demand out there. Black markets can still thrive. Hence, to stop supply, we need to stop the demand.

CONCLUSION

“For many people, COVID-19 has been a wake-up call. We need to establish a different kind of relationship with the natural world and with animals because…it’s our disrespect of nature and animals that led to the pandemic in the first place”.

—  Dr. Jane Morris Goodall, English primatologist and anthropologist

As the coronavirus epidemic escalates into a global emergency, wildlife trade and factory farming is no longer merely a conservation or ethics issue. It is a public health issue. A biosafety issue. A national security issue.

 

As long as we rear animals in the way that we are doing right now, the next pandemic will always be a matter of “when”, not “if”. And then the next question follows, “how bad?”

 

After being lockdown for many months, witnessing millions succumb to the virus and losing trillions of dollars as the global economy faces turmoil, is it all really worth it — just for some piece of meat on your dinner plate?

 

You make the call.

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