Animals
We Now Know How Important This Is!
Vietnam is looking at a more effective ban against illegal trading and the consumption of wildlife. Selling slaughtered and live animals for pets, food or traditional medicine, legally and illegally, is a billion-dollar industry. A wide variety of species from pangolins to macaque monkeys, tiger cubs, bats, live reptiles and bears, are sold online, in street markets, and are linked to 1,000s of farms. www.theguardian.com
Food
Boosting Your Immune System to Fight Covid-19
In a randomized controlled trial investigating the effects of consuming fruits and vegetables on immunity, elderly participants eating five servings a day for 12 weeks produced more antibodies in response to a vaccine protective against pneumonia than those consuming only one serving per day. The study shows that switching to a more plant-rich diet can significantly improve immune response to infectious disease. www.balanced.org.
the Climate Crisis
A Costly Silver Lining
Covid-19 reduced China’s CO2 emissions by 25% for February compared with the same month last year due to lower industrial output. And we’re already seeing the start of reductions in emissions and air pollution in European and US regions currently under lockdown. A key question in the fight against global heating is whether we take this opportunity, achieved at such great cost, to transition more quickly to a greener economy once Covid-19 abates. www.carbonbrief.org.
speaking words of wisdom
“We … are still ignoring the truth staring us in the face: the killing of animals for food is having a devastating impact on our world. It’s a leading cause of human illness, meaning heart disease and cancer. It’s a leading cause of climate change, habitat destruction, wildlife extinction, water pollution and water scarcity. It’s a leading cause of human world hunger because animals eat so much more than they produce as meat or dairy. Now, add to the list, it is causing the most disruptive virus of our lifetimes.”
— Joshua Awesome of kindlythrive.com
On The Horizon
Photo: Magdalena Smolnicka on Unsplash
We Need to Tackle the Underlying Cause of Pandemics
While the world anxiously awaits the arrival of a vaccine for Covid-19 to mitigate the devastating effects of the current pandemic (such a vaccine is estimated to be 12 to 18 months away), this is only a band aid –- damage control at best -- to stop millions from dying. And we’re not even talking about preventing the next pandemic which is considered inevitable unless we stop -- in the words of ecologist Carl Safina -- “farming and killing animals”.
We know the cause, the circumstances that enable zoonotic diseases to jump the species barrier from animals to humans. They almost always come from livestock or wild animals -- the wildlife trade, the bushmeat trade, factory farming, and we’ve already experienced a long litany of examples: HIV, SARS, H1N1 Swine flu, Mad Cow disease, MERS, Bird flu, Ebola and, now, Covid-19.
“The current system is broken. It is inefficient, insecure, unsustainable, and extremely unsafe,” says Dr. Liz Specht, Associate Director of Science and Technology at The Good Food Institute in the US, in a recent op-ed for Wired magazine. Covid-19 is yet another reason to change how we produce our meat and tackle the underlying cause of the latest pandemic. As Dr. Specht explains, the entire meat category is being redefined as a sensory experience derived from a combination of amino acids, fats and minerals rather than by its production methods. No animal has to be farmed or hunted and no disease has to be risked to enjoy a juicy burger or a crispy nugget. Plant-based and cultivated meat options are sustainable, remove the threat of zoonotic diseases and give us a “painless swap at the dinner table”.
While cultivated meat (produced from actual animal cells), is still a few years away from being on the market, plant-based meat exists today in a category that is growing fast and at prices that will decline as the big food companies enter the space. Covid-19 is believed to be the latest example of the disastrous consequences of humans consuming virus-carrying wild animals. If a wholesale switch to alternative forms of protein is not on the horizon it certainly needs to be.
perspective
Stopping the Destruction Caused By Wildlife Trafficking
The Covid-19 pandemic is yet another huge wake-up call regarding the ongoing role of illegal wildlife trafficking as a likely source and enabler of new pathogens that threaten human health. See our blog Traffick. This multi-billion-dollar criminal enterprise also has a long history of animal cruelty, species extinction, and habitat destruction.
The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), founded by legendary ethologist and environmentalist Dr. Jane Goodall, has launched a campaign to raise awareness of the multiple destructive elements of wild animal trafficking that is pushing most endangered species to the brink of extinction. The goal of Forever Wild is to stop wildlife crime against all species and, specifically, the great apes.
All great apes, including orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, are “critically endangered” and 3,000 are lost from the wild every year due to illegal trafficking. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, are regularly poached for the exotic pet trade, killed for bush meat, procured for disreputable “zoos” or used for tourist entertainment. The campaign shows what we can do to help, including making our smart phones part of the solution! For more info, scroll down to “Charting Our Path”.
sparing cats and dogs
It surely beats eating them or so Shenzhen’s municipal government has decided in passing legislation that makes it the first city in China to ban the consumption of cats and dogs. Dog eating has become increasingly controversial among young people in China who are more likely to view them as companions rather than food. Humane Society International estimates 10 – 20 million dogs are killed for meat annually in China and an estimated four million cats meet the same fate according to Animals Asia.
Photo: Anusha Barwa on Unsplash
Good news
The pristine waters off a stretch of Nova Scotia’s coastline in Canada has been selected as a “retirement” home for whales raised in captivity. The US-based non-profit, “The Whale Sanctuary”, announced that eight whales will make the expansive but sheltered bay their new home. They will be fed and cared for by the group as they re-adapt to life in the wild. The sanctuary should be ready to receive its new guests by the end of 2021.
The US National Institutes of Health isn’t waiting for animal testing to be done before going to human trials to produce a vaccine for Covid-19. Experts agree that 95 out of 100 drugs that are tested on animals fail in humans anyway. Could this pave the way for reducing unnecessary experimentation on animals?
China is now a net importer of food to feed its 1.4B people. David Yeung, founder of Green Monday, says the arrival of Covid-19 means the government will need to examine how it is going to feed its population sustainably and healthfully going forward. “The triple threat of coronavirus, Asian Swine Flu and avian flu fully expose the vulnerability of the protein/food supply chain. From a consumer standpoint, demand for safe, reliable healthy food will absolutely skyrocket,” Yeung told the South China Morning Post.
Covid-19 put paid to the Bull market on stock exchanges around the world as well as 21 bullfights in Spain that have been cancelled due to restrictions on public gatherings. It is estimated that this will save 120 bulls from being slaughtered in this cruel sport.
data points
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says about 75% of recently emerging infectious diseases affecting people, began as diseases in animals.
An estimated 20,000 farms raise wild animals for slaughter in China.
Some context for emission numbers: The average emissions per person globally is five tonnes of CO2 per year for a total of 35B tonnes. The average American emits 18 tonnes/year and Canadians are close behind at 16 tonnes/year. If you live in a rich country and live a typical lifestyle one would probably emit between five and 20 tonnes per year. In India, the average emissions per person is 1.5 tonnes. Climate and Lifestyle
Cattle in US feedlots produce 60B lbs. of manure a year, the equivalent to the annual sewage produced by 45M people. Each beef cow produces 23,000 lbs. of manure annually and generates air, water and soil pollution that impacts nearby communities. www.foodandwaterwatch.org
climate connection
These articles are adapted from The Climate Beat, the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic initiative committed to more and better climate coverage.
The virus’s outbreak, of course, has already reshaped virtually all facets of public life across the globe, and climate action is no exception. In recent months, climate concern finally seemed to be breaking through to the mainstream and dominating much of the global financial conversation. Now, coronavirus has rocked markets and brought that conversation to a halt. But as climate talks and conferences are cancelled — even rightly so — experts and activists are worried about what stalled momentum will mean for another global crisis in which we already have no time to spare, according to Bloomberg Green.
Climate change will contribute to disease spread in various ways, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe writes in a useful Twitter thread. Not only will warmer temperatures increase the geographic range of infectious diseases “with scary names like zika or chikingunya,” she explains, it may also decrease humans’ immune response to diseases. “Climate change is … a THREAT MULTIPLIER,” Hayhoe says. “It takes what we already care about — and what more than our health?— and makes many, not all but many, of [the threats] worse.”
Check out Owen Jones’s excellent piece in The Guardian, “Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?”
charting our path
The Jane Goodall Institute’s campaign Forever Wild is designed to stop wildlife trafficking and help us understand how our likes and shares on social media can either help preserve or destroy these animals. While social media can be a force for good by connecting us with -- and deepening our understanding of -- the natural world, JGI says those cute chimp videos on social media actually fuel the demand for the illegal trafficking of chimpanzees.
“Selling chimps is both illegal and horribly cruel.” For every baby chimp taken as a pet, 10 family members are killed trying to defend their offspring from poachers. These animals are highly social and do not do well when separated from their family group, are often abused or kept in miserable conditions and soon become too big and strong to be kept as pets.
“All animals should be treated with respect and there should be nothing in social media to encourage people to buy wild animals as pets or to think that animals used in entertainment are ‘happy’. Please help us share the message that many animals, including chimpanzees and other apes, are endangered in the wild and we should share nothing online that might give a boost to the illegal wildlife trade,” says Dr. Goodall.
Editor’s note: We began planning this newsletter by asking: Is our audience interested in anything other than Covid-19? So, we’ve connected it to the topics we typically cover. Because it is all connected. It’s believed this pandemic originated from people eating animals from a live animal market, and when one thinks back to Swine flu (pigs), Bird flu (chickens), MERS (camels), Mad Cow disease, SARS (bats and civets), HIV and Ebola (chimpanzees), the health risks from eating animals – wild or raised for food – are enormous. Factory farms and cages offer perfect breeding grounds for new, deadly zoonotic diseases. The case for shifting our diets to safer, more sustainable foods such as plants is stronger than ever. The reality is that COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic if humanity fails to learn from this one.