Story by: Jessica Scott-Reid.
Jessica is a Canadian writer, animal advocate and plant-based food expert. Her work appears regularly in media across Canada and the US.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it important questions about humans’ interference with animals, and how that interference can result in dangerous outcomes for us, the animals and the planet. Of greatest concern right now is the emergence of zoonotic diseases, and their ability to spread among humans. But some scientists believe we need to look further, to the potential for these viruses to spread widely through the mass movement of live animals destined to end up as food. Live transport and export of animals across countries, borders and seas have been largely condemned by advocates in recent years, due to noted animal welfare issues. Today, the risk of spreading diseases is rising quickly to the top of an already long list of concerns.
In a January 2020 article for The Guardian, senior scientist and epidemiologist at biotech company Metabiota, David McIver, states that “a rise in live animal exports was a growing issue for many diseases, including avian influenza virus, mad cow disease and Nipah virus.” The 1998 Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia, he explains, was caused by bats eating fruit then dropping that fruit with their saliva into a pig farm, where it was eaten by pigs who were then eaten by humans. The result was 105 human deaths, and countless pigs killed to control the outbreak. “If we’re exporting those animals around the world,” says McIver, “we’re potentially moving unknown pathogens to new places.” McIver also highlights the ban on British live cattle exports and beef products in the 1990s, due to the fear of spreading mad cow disease.
“The more you are going to move animals, the more you run the risk that diseases will be spread through these animals,” said Jeroen Dewulf, a veterinarian at Ghent University in Belgium, in the same article. “There are other routes, the virus can be transmitted in meat products for example, but it’s much more efficient to transmit via live animals,” he adds.
In addition to worries about disease spread, animal advocates are also voicing concern about the treatment of animals in transport during the Covid pandemic. One Canadian activist, Trevor Miller, has been writing to cabinet ministers and political parties calling for the suspension of all live farmed animal transport journeys of over eight hours, believing that “neither veterinarians nor the police will have time during the Covid-19 crisis to enforce compliance” of what are already considered by advocates to be very weak transport standards.
Miller is also calling for the suspension of all live animal exports, by land, sea, and air, to international destinations, writing that there is “a real risk that ships arriving in international ports will not be allowed to unload the animals as countries close their borders, and this would lead to massive welfare problems.” He adds that importing countries will be “even less likely than at present to be able to ensure that animals are slaughtered in accordance with Canadian and international standards.”
Broiler chickens being transported to slaughter. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media.
“It seems right now, as everyone is focused on human concerns, that a very fragile aspect of the food production system is about to show its inability to adapt,” says Miller, pointing to both the transport and slaughter of farmed animals in Canada, and beyond. “Drivers and others involved in transport are often excluded from quarantine and isolation requirements, while those employed in slaughterhouse facilities are unable to follow physical distancing guidelines on the kill line and elsewhere in the operation,” he points out. “As this continues, and feedlots, slaughter facilities, drivers, and others are affected, enforcement agencies won’t be able to hold industry accountable for following even the relatively weak transport guidelines.”
Similar concerns are being expressed in other regions, including Europe, where long traffic lineups at border crossings are “leading trucks with live animals to wait for several hours just to advance a few miles or, sometimes, just meters (see here),” writes Spain-based researcher Daniela R. Waldhorn for EffectiveAltruism.org. “Likewise, these queues at the borders are making it impossible to attend to the welfare of animals caught up in them, according to a letter signed by several animal welfare organizations.”
According to The Guardian, campaigners in Europe are also calling for the “suspension of all live animal shipments out of Europe, and a restriction to the shortest possible journeys within Europe, over welfare and animal diseases concerns.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), estimates that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, and that three out of five infectious diseases are spread by animals. The Covid-19 pandemic is pressing us all to re-evaluate how we interact with animals, how we confine them, how we move them from one place to another, and how we treat them along the way. As much of the world comes to a halt, perhaps so too should the trucks, planes and ships carrying animals bound for slaughter, so as to reduce the risk of the next deadly outbreak.