Surely the link between abusing animals and the
world's health is now clear
Nick Cohen
A disregard for creature welfare is often central
to disease. But politicians won’t dare make the connection
Sat 11 Apr
2020 18.30 BSTLast modified on Sat 11 Apr 2020 19.36 BST
Crowded
cages strain hens’ health and ultimately contributes to the spread of
antibiotic resistance. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
The boast
that “when the facts change, I change my mind” is a proud one. “When the facts
change, I reinforce my prejudices” is truer. If you want proof, look at the
coronavirus that has changed everything and consider the undisputed fact that
it spread because of humanity’s abuse of animals.
Imagine a
world where facts changed minds. The United Nations, governments and everyone
with influence would now be saying we should abandon meat or at a minimum cut
down on consumption. Perhaps my reading is not as wide as it should be, but I
have heard nothing of the sort argued. Making the case would be child’s play
and would not be confined to emphasising that Covid-19 probably jumped species
in Wuhan’s grotesque wet markets. The Sars epidemic of 2002-04 began in
Guangdong, probably in bats, and then spread to civet cats, sold in markets and
eaten in restaurants. The H7N9 strain of bird flu began in China, once again,
and moved to humans from diseased poultry.
China is a
viral petri dish because the Communist party silences voices that warn of
danger, as the heroic doctor Li Wenliang found. Centuries of imperial and
socialist dictatorship have taught people to respect the adage “The shot hits
the bird that pokes its head out”. Repression combines with folk beliefs in the
medicinal power of animal carcasses, a deadly quackery that the world’s fastest
growing middle class has the money to indulge. Bats, which may be the original
source of coronavirus as well as Sars, are meant to restore eyesight. The palm
civet is devoured as a sham cure for insomnia.
Yet it is
too comfortable to damn the Chinese Communist party, essential though that task
is. Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) originated in the Middle East, as
its name suggests, and came to humans via camels. Ebola began in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo and was probably caught from gorillas and chimpanzees.
Diseases have always jumped species, but the Covid-19 pandemic may be a sign of
an ominous acceleration. A paper this month in the Proceedings of the Royal
Society suggests the rate of new infections could be rising as humans cram into
every corner of the planet. The loss of habitat and the exploitation of
wildlife through hunting and trade increased the risk of infectious
“spillover”, it said. Ferocious punishments for the use of “exotic” animals for
food and medicines are required. Once again, though, that is too easy a slogan
for people in the west to chant and feel virtuous as they chant it. We should
be examining our own diets.
If
antibiotic resistance continues to grow, we may look back on the deaths of the
coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and say: “Really? Was that all?” Resistance could
end the age of medical progress, returning humanity to a time when minor
injuries and routine operations could be fatal. The over-prescription of antibiotics
to humans explains in part why bacteria are evolving to resist it, and why
researchers are predicting 10 million deaths a year from antibiotic resistance
by 2050. Antibiotic use in the intensive and unfathomably cruel production of
meat is as pernicious. Factory farming strains animal health. Breeding sows
that are not given enough time to recover before being impregnated again, and
chickens in crowded cages suffering from heat stress that brings salmonella and
E coli, need repeated doses. In 2012, when the then chief medical officer,
Sally Davies, warned that antibiotics were losing their “effectiveness at a
rate that is both alarming and irreversible”, she compared the looming health
crisis to global warming. To make her comparison complete, we can add that meat
eating does indeed contribute disproportionately to the production of
greenhouse gasses.
Ban the use
of antibiotics in farming, then. Treat meat, cow milk and cheese as we treat
tobacco and alcohol and hit them with punitive taxes. Make the illegal trade in
wild animals as great a crime as the illegal trade in weapons.
Rather than change minds, the corona crisis is
cementing them
However
rational such stirring declarations may be, I feel I am no longer connected to
myself or the world around me when I issue them. I am not a vegan. If changing
facts changed minds, I should become one – as should you, in all likelihood.
Even if individuals change, the dominant culture makes demands for society to
change appear ridiculously utopian. Imagine a politician campaigning for stiff
restrictions on meat consumption. Critics would accuse him or her of punishing
the poor – for people who barely think of the poor always invoke them when
their pleasures are threatened. They would be damned for wanting to ban the
good old Sunday lunch and the joy a Big Mac brings. Our grandchildren may look
back and find our abuse of animals incomprehensible. For the moment, arguments
to stop abuse provoke incomprehension.
Rather than
change minds, the corona crisis is cementing them. No one knows its political
and cultural consequences, only that there will be consequences. Ignorance has
not stopped Jeremy Corbyn saying the pandemic proved his socialism was
“absolutely right” and Nigel Farage saying that, on the contrary, it showed he
was right about free movement being doomed. Trump blames China. China blames
America. In other words, they are all saying and doing what they would have
said and done if the virus had never jumped the species barrier and no one
outside China had heard of Wuhan’s wet markets.
Today’s
suffering dominates our thoughts, but beneath it two explanations of human
behaviour are competing. Optimists believe that governments and peoples will
adapt to new circumstances and recognise new realities. We will soon learn if
they are right.
The great
physicist Max Planck put the pessimistic case in 1950. A new scientific truth
does not triumph by convincing its opponents, he said. Rather, “its opponents
eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.
Planck’s
admirers condensed his argument into a phrase that is a little too resonant
today: “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
• Nick
Cohen is an Observer columnist
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