Animals
THE HIDDEN HORSEMEAT TRADE
The Canadian Horse Defence Coalition link is going to court to stop the export of live horses and frozen horsemeat for human consumption. In 2018, 3,400 live horses were shipped by air from Canada to Japan. The coalition says that overcrowded shipping crates violate regulations and some horses have died during transport. Horsemeat is sold in Quebec but most of it’s exported to Japan, the US and France.
Food
STOP LIVE ANIMAL EXPORTS?
Members of the European Parliament and campaigners have called on the EU to ban live animal exports to reduce the spread of zoonotic diseases (those that jump from animals to humans). The European Food Safety Authority has warned the live export trade is a potential risk to public health. See our recent blog. Animals stressed from handling and transport are a risk factor for disease, they can then infect others and increase the risk to public health. www.theguardian.com
the Climate Crisis
WARNING LABELS FOR FOSSIL FUEL PRODUCTS?
Public health experts are calling for tobacco-style warning labels for airline tickets, energy bills, and gas pumps, according to the British Medical Journal. They argue such labels will help consumers connect the abstract threat of the climate crisis with the immediate impact of fossil fuel purchases here. Changing consumer behaviour, they believe, could help reduce fossil fuel-related air pollution that causes 3.5 million premature deaths a year globally.
speaking words of wisdom
“… some of these epidemics have started with viruses jumping from domestic animals in awful intensive farms, where the conditions are horrendous, with crowding and poor hygiene. It’s not just wildlife, it’s the way we treat our domestic animals too.”
— Dr. Jane Goodall, famed ethologist and environmentalist.
“The solutions are political and economic, but they are also personal. Never has it been more clear that we are all connected and that how we treat animals has significant and often fatal effects – for them, and for us.”
— Dr. Kendra Coulter, Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media.
perspective
We Must Ensure Our Food System Doesn’t Cause Future Pandemics
The shocking scale of the global pandemic is forcing the world to search for the origins of Covid-19. There is a dawning realization that our systematic abuse of animals, both wild and farmed, plays a key role in the spread of new diseases. And that fixing our broken food system is part of the answer to reducing the risk of future outbreaks.
As the profile of expert scientific opinion continues to rise and regain credibility through the media (The Guardian and LA Times) we are waking up to the well documented risk and predictable threat of zoonotic diseases -– those that jump from animals to humans. The wildlife trade and wet markets in Asia and Africa have provided the perfect conditions for the spread of deadly pathogens such as SARS, HIV, Ebola and possibly Covid-19, thought to have originated in -- or been transmitted through -- a wet market in Wuhan, although the exact origins are still unknown.
And there is more recognition of the multiple studies that show how increasing rates of habitat destruction around the world, that result in more human-animal interactions, are releasing new viruses and bacteria that endanger humans NYT.
But, despite some high-profile commentary in mainstream media such as the NY Times, Time magazine and even the conservative National Review, there is still only limited recognition of the role that industrialized animal agriculture plays in the deadly chain of events that create pandemics.
This pandemic and the Covid-19 virus did not originate in the factory farming system, but intensive animal agriculture, especially chicken and pig operations, has played – and continues to play -- a key role in the spread of avian and other influenzas that are deadly to humans.
Photo: Another new factory farm. Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media.
It is an all-too-easy deflection of our responsibility to blame cultural food and medicinal traditions in Asia as the cause of the problem and avoid confronting the risk posed by western-style meat production. And it is ironic that the rapid growth of factory farming in China has forced small holder Chinese farmers to expand into farming wild animals for food and medicine and that this incursion into natural habitats helps release new pathogens The Guardian.
The CDC says that three out of four emerging diseases come from animals, most of them wild. And while farmed animals are not usually the cause of new pathogens, they are a key part of and a proven intermediary in the zoonotic transmission cycle that allow emerging diseases to move from wild animals via farmed animals to humans. See graphic in “Charting Our Path” section below. The CDC says the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 “swine flu”, that originated in pigs, killed an estimated 151,000 to 575,000 people globally.
Our addiction to cheap meat ensures that factory farms continue to be ideal incubators for the spread of disease. Animal welfare and farming expert Lewis Bollard of the Open Philanthropy Project, cites new research on these risks from public health scientists Cynthia Schuck and Wladimir Alonso Report.
“They explain how factory farms provide a perfect breeding ground for highly pathogenic viruses: a high density of genetically uniform animals, suffering immunosuppression induced by chronic stress, living on top of their own waste without sunlight or fresh air. They also explore how factory farms’ abuse of antibiotics is hastening a post-antibiotic era, where bacteria could be as deadly as viruses,” Bollard says.
Viruses in these conditions can mutate and combine with other viruses, become deadly to humans and jump the species barrier in a spillover event. While these events are rare, if we perpetuate the ideal cross over conditions of wet markets, habitat destruction and factory farms, it is just a matter of time before the next deadly zoonotic pathogen emerges.
While the factory farm/slaughter food chain in the West faces tighter regulations than wet markets, it is not disease-proof. Zoonotic diseases aside, our current food system still manages to produce common food borne pathogens including salmonella and E. coli on a regular basis. These types of pathogens sicken 48 million, hospitalize 128,000 and kill more than 3,000 Americans annually according to the CDC.
great apes at risk too?
In the journal Nature, conservation experts said that Covid-19 also presents a serious threat to the survival of our closest living relatives, the great apes. They urged the suspension of great ape tourism and the reduction of field research (with provisions for lost income) until we know whether the mortality and morbidity of Covid-19 in humans are similar in apes. The transmission of even mild human pathogens has resulted in moderate-to-severe outcomes in these endangered animals in the past.
Jane Goodall 2018 Photo Credit Christian Modler.
Good news
Researchers at MIT have developed a portable sensor that can detect the earliest signs of ripening in fruits and vegetables. This could significantly reduce the food loss in supply chains by helping farmers, food transporters and grocery stores manage and use these foods before they rot. The UN’s FAO estimates 30 - 40% of food is lost in developing countries before it reaches the market. www.anthropocenemagazine.org
In a possible “game changer” for animal protection in China, dogs don’t appear on a recently-released draft list of animals that can be farmed for meat. If the proposal becomes final -- and is enforced -- it would the first country-wide ban on the consumption of dogs in China.
A major new study published in the journal Nature says it’s still possible for humanity to restore the health of our oceans by 2050. Efforts such as designating specific areas for protection, pollution control and sustainable fishing are showing results. However, the study warns pollution from plastic and farms is still pouring into the oceans and the climate crisis has to be tackled as well to stop acidification, loss of oxygen and the devastation of coral reefs.
Cultivated meat company, Memphis Meats, just closed a $161 million round of funding – greater than all of the combined, publicly disclosed investments in cultivated meat companies to-date. An industry observer sees this as validation on the part of investors of the company’s technology and commercial prospects and said, “meat without animals is here”.
data points
In light of Covid-19, some shocking statistics from the US National Institutes of Health show zoonotic diseases already cause 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million deaths globally each year.
There are multiple avian flu outbreaks going on currently in China, India, the Philippines and the US. One of them, H5N1, is current circulating in chicken farms and while transmission to humans is rare it does have a human mortality rate of 60%.
Let’s celebrate some conservation efforts that have worked: In 1968, there were only a few hundred humpback whales remaining, today there are 40,000. Sea otters in Western Canada had declined to a few dozen, now there are thousands. In the Baltic Sea, populations of grey seals and cormorants are soaring. Nature
The exploitation of wild animals doesn’t just happen (depending on where you live), in faraway places. Canada has an estimated 1.5 million privately-owned exotic animals including nearly 4,000 big cats.
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.
InsideClimate News has a stellar look at the farmworkers on the frontline of the US food supply. They already bear a disproportionate burden from climate change impacts —"toiling under conditions of record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, drought, and floods”— and are now especially vulnerable to the coronavirus outbreak. Already prone to respiratory illness due to the nature of their work, they are also excluded from federal virus relief because they are undocumented. The workers are terrified, InsideClimate News reports, but show up to the fields anyway because they and their families need the money.
The first three months of 2020 were scorchers, relative to the same period in past years, with each month breaking or nearly breaking monthly record temperatures, according to Mashable. “The continued onslaught of record and near-record global temperatures is a reminder that, while we’re understandably preoccupied with another crisis (the Coronavirus pandemic), a more formidable one in the grand schemes of things looms in the background,” the climate scientist Michael Mann tells Mashable.
The Columbia Journalism Review unveiled its Spring Issue recently, with stories focused entirely on the media’s (often bungled) handling of the climate crisis. “I am convinced that journalism’s failure to properly report the climate story will be recorded as one of its great humiliations,” writes Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, in the magazine’s opener. The press struggles with stories that demand subtlety and evolve over time—racism, systemic poverty, and the climate. “We owe it to our audience, and our conscience, to be more thoughtful,” Pope says. “Climate change is the story of our time. Journalism will be judged by how it chronicles the devastating reality.”
charting our path
About 75% of new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic and most come from wild life. However, farm animals can act as intermediary hosts and pass these viruses along to humans as shown above.
Editor’s note: As we navigate these difficult times, 2020 is shaping up to be: “The Year of Living Differently”. Even as societies and economies start to tentatively emerge from Covid-19, we are seeing dramatic changes to systems and lifestyles. Changes that are challenging our beliefs and perceptions of what is “normal” and, rightly, dominating public discussion. We’ll continue to bring you a mix of topical items but from a perspective that seeks to make connections that others don’t. The climate crisis hasn’t gone away it’s merely been overtaken temporarily, and while humanity has been forced to lighten its carbon footprint for now, experts say its long-term impact will be minimal.