The pandemic has caused havoc with existing social systems, making people question how our societies accomplish fundamental tasks like policing, energy policy, and food production. The livestock industry finds itself in the center of this mounting debate.
Thousands of animals have been culled, often not humanely, as a result of the pandemic disrupting the for-profit market. Mistreatment of farm animals influences the way meat packing workers are treated. Workers are forced back to work despite plants becoming COVID-19 hotspots. Ten of the fourteen rural counties with the highest infection rates contain meatpacking plant outbreaks. These plants are owned by huge industrial farming operations like Tyson Foods, National Beef, Smithfield, Cargill and JBS. More than twenty thousand workers have been infected.
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| dead pangolins at market, credit Getty Images |
Factory farming is inherently cruel. Domestic animals are treated as commodity units to be processed as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Pigs are intelligent animals who communicate, raise families, and have social structures. Their health and well-being does not enter into a corporation's profit calculations. It is clear, if one discounts the politically motivated hysteria caused by a dysfunctional national government, that factory food production in China is implicated in the genesis and spread of SARS CoV-2. It could also happen here. Workers and animals are crammed into confined spaces with lax safety standards, in humane killing methods, and overuse of antibiotics--ripe conditions for the creation of a zoonotic virus. Factory farming should be abandoned in favor of decentralized, smaller, independent farming operations that existed before giant conglomerates captured the market through economies of scale that have become very vulnerable to market shocks. Senator Booker (D-NJ) said the food system was "broken by large, multinational corporations because of their buying power and size, have undue influence
over the marketplace and over public policy." He introduced an agricultural reform bill that calls for a moratorium on factory farms.
Jane Goodall, prominent scientist and conservationist, warned of the dire
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| bush meat, Equatorial Guinea, credit Getty Images |
consequences of continuing down the path of the abusive exploitation of the natural world and intensive animal farming. She told a webinar audience, "If we do not do things differently, we are finished. We can't go on very much longer like this." It is now well known that virulent diseases are pouring out of tropical rainforests and into wild meatmarkets where man has disrupted natural systems by his rampant exploitation. Ebola, which kills 90% of the people it infects, jumped the inter-species gap from chimpanzees to humans. Ebola unleashed an unprecedented pestilance in Africa the 1990s and has returned today. Not only Ebola, but SARS, H1N1, MERS and now SARS CoV-2 originated in animals. Rabies and bubonic plague made this journey centuries ago. New pathogens (Lassa fever, Nipah, Zika and West Nile) are crossing over into humans because of increasingly close interaction with previously isolated wild landscapes that we are rapidly altering and destroying. The CDC estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect us originate in animals. Zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behavior; scientific research has established this fact.
The "wet market" in Wuhan, were SARS CoV-2 is thought to have originated,
was notorious for selling numerous wild animals including wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles , scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles. In has been closed down by Chinese authorities but not before it generated a pandemic. The sad fact is that the poor in under-developed nations do not have refrigerators, and depend on wild meat to supplement their meager diets. Connections in the modern world have brought wild diseases much closer to human civilization. In the end we, as a species that respects no other, will be responsible for our own demise.
For
what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is
the same;
as one dies, so dies the other.
They all have the same breath,
and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 3:19
The pandemic has caused havoc with existing social systems, making people question how our societies accomplish fundamental tasks like policing, energy policy, and food production. The livestock industry finds itself in the center of this mounting debate. Thousands of animals have been culled, often not humanely, as a result of the pandemic disrupting the for-profit market. Mistreatment of farm animals influences the way meat packing workers are treated. Workers are forced back to work despite plants becoming COVID-19 hotspots. Ten of the fourteen rural counties with the highest infection rates contain meatpacking plant outbreaks. These plants are owned by huge industrial farming operations like Tyson Foods, National Beef, Smithfield, Cargill and JBS. More than twenty thousand workers have been infected.
