Cover Image is of a Pallid Bat [1]

The initial headlines most of us saw earlier this year probably still ring in our heads: “Novel coronavirus spreads throughout the world”, “COVID-19 pandemic reaches the United States”, “Global stock markets post biggest falls since 2008…”[2], “COVID-19 suspected to originate from a bat in a wet market in Wuhan” and even the infamous “China Virus” statements from the White House administration.

Underneath these headlines lie a number of implicit questions that are all an exploration of “how did this catastrophe happen?” Where did this originate and who is responsible? What could we have done differently and what can we do to prevent the next one? This piece will be an exploration of these questions and a meditation on the themes of blame and prevention in the narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

Part 1: “China”

The first suspect of origin is a bat, specifically a bat from “a wet market in Wuhan, China”.

The first thing that needs to be addressed is the so-called “wet markets” of China. A wet market is defined as “a market for the sale of fresh meat, fish, and produce.”[4] Wet markets are essentially the same thing as Western farmers markets and act in both urban and rural communities as a locus for distribution of meat, produce, and sometimes live animals. The term wet market in its dictionary sense [4] is used to distinguish from “dry markets”: markets for durable goods such as fabrics and electronics. However, in contemporary usage the term has become a way of othering the consumption of meat in non-Western countries. “Wet market” makes the market sound foreign and sound different from a marketplace in the West such as a farmers market, which it is not. This false dichotomy allows us to decry the “wet markets” of China as wrong but to go to our own farmers markets back home the next day without recognizing the implicit hypocrisy. The intentional use of this terminology to create a false dichotomy between what “we” do and what “they” do is reminiscent of how we decry the “prison camps”, “death squads”, and “rogue states” of the world but fail to recognize that these are just politically charged alternatives for the terms “prison”, “military”, and “country”[5].

This discourse is epitomized by the declaration of COVID-19 as “the China virus” by prominent United States administration officials, led by President Trump. Such terminology, while disguised in “truth” (the first cases were observed in China) only serves to divide us and to other the population of China. One may notice that these terms shift the conversation away from a  productive discussion on pandemic prevention and instead toward a xenophobic “us vs them” polarization of the West against the East that attempts to assign blame onto Chinese agricultural systems. This blame is not only unproductive but a false one, as a deep dive into the Chinese animal agriculture industry uncovers problems that are systemic to industrialized animal agriculture, which is prevalent in both China and the West. These terms of “China virus” and “wet markets” are not isolated either; they both stand as examples of a larger consistent narrative of xenophobia towards non-Western countries, especially so in this case towards China, as a means of polarization, assigning blame, avoiding culpability, and subsequently constitute a failure to address the underlying causes of contemporary pandemics.

“but wait. They’re eating dogs and bats in China! How is that ethical or right? Isn’t that the problem?”

The short answer is no, that isn’t the problem.

While in the West, we eat pigs, cattle, fish, and poultry, other cultures consume animals that in the west are seen as “exotic” in terms of consumption such as dogs, bats, and guinea pigs. I posit to you that there is absolutely no fundamental difference between these two modes of consumption other than what we define as socially acceptable. There is no relevant moral characteristic that places any one of these creatures above or below one another. These are all animals with varying levels of intelligence that are capable of emotions[6], pain[7], and subsequently suffering. There is absolutely no difference between the consumption of these two animals other than the fact that we have been taught culturally in the West that eating pigs, cows, and chickens is normal and okay, and that eating dogs is wrong. Appearance and inferred demeanor should not dictate moral worth.

One example of “exotic” meat consumption that has attracted controversy is the Yulin dog festival in China. The Yulin dog festival is an event held every year in Yulin, Guangxi Province, China, where thousands of dogs are sold live for slaughter and then subsequently cooked and served in a variety of dishes. This event has gotten considerable negative media attention, especially in the West, for its celebration of the tradition of dog meat consumption and around allegations of inhumane treatment and inhumane slaughter. Marches, tweets, op-eds, and petitions have spread among both celebrities and average citizens alike in protest of the dog meat festival. 

Another example centers around the many athletes and spectators who decried the 2018 Winter Olympics (located in South Korea) due to the consumption of dog meat in South Korea [9], with some thousands of spectators threatening to boycott the Olympics because of this and some athletes rescuing dogs from the dog trade to take back home. 

However, these criticisms are truly emblematic of the hypocrisy often present in Western critiques of non-Western animal consumption; we decry these non-Western practices in the West as “inhumane” but back at home purchase meat that came from factory farms that, by design, commit similar atrocities in the forms of mutilatation, torture, and sexually assault of almost all animals that go through them.

Pictures of sad dogs in cages trigger a strong emotional reaction to most Westerners and are often seen in campaigns against the consumption of dog meat, but we rarely (not never, but rarely) see these same activists putting up pictures of sad chickens in cages. The difference in emotional affect between imagery of the suffering of the dog and the suffering of the chicken is used by activists to center the conversation around the ethicality of the consumption of dogmeat and to avoid the question of the ethicality of consumption of poultry, primarily because of Western complicity in consumption of poultry but not in consumption of dogmeat.

While all animals are worth fighting for, if we are only willing to criticize the systems of the East for unethical forms of meat consumption but are unwilling to criticize our own unethical forms of meat consumption, our criticism is short-sided and a facade, intentionally or unintentionally, for xenophobia towards the East. We must examine the systems we inhabit before we criticize the systems of others. It is by expanding our advocacy and criticisms to be inclusive of our own complicity as individuals and as a society that we can make our advocacy and criticisms true and unhypocritical.

Perhaps the difference in emotional affect has something to do with our attachment to the dog; implicit in their status as a companion we recognize their various mental, physical, and emotional capabilities, ability to suffer and feel things, and have subsequently made them our companions. The idea of eating our companions, of eating man’s best friend seems a little weird, due to the societal perception of them as “friends” not “food”. But I posit to you that beyond a feeling of “weirdness” about eating the animal due to our prolonged daily exposure to it, there is no substantial argument of why eating dog is any different than eating pig, ethically. If you feel strongly against the dog meat trade and the consumption of dogs in the East, I do not seek to invalidate that; in fact I would encourage you to explore that feeling further, to examine the underlying compassion and to consider that pigs and cows might be deserving of some consideration and advocacy as well. 

Another point is worth making: the consumption of “exotic” meats, such as dog meat, make up a minority of meat consumption in China, contrary to popular stereotypes and Western belief. 72% of Chinese citizens consume dog meat less than 6 times per year. [12] Bat meat also makes up a minority of consumption and is most often found in rural areas. However, the reality of dog meat consumption constituting a minority of meat consumption is suppressed in the Western media and in Western culture as it runs counter to the caricature of every Chinese citizen eating dog all the time, which stands as a stereotype for Westerners to demonize and criticize. It is through the statistics around dog consumption that we see these criticisms against the “dog-eating Chinese” as not only hypocritical and missing the point due to our own mass consumption of animal products, but as intentionally misrepresentative and subsequently xenophobic as a means of stereotyping of the Chinese population.

Part 2: Disease

Beyond being a disease, what do the Bubonic Plague, likely the 1918 Spanish Flu [13], Marburg of 1967, Ebola of 1976, the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 80s and beyond [14], Nipah of 1998 [15], SARS of 2002 [16], H5N1(Avian Flu) of 2003 [17], almost every prior H5 and H7 Flu [18], H1N1(Swine Flu) of 2009 [19], MERS of 2012 [20], West Nile Virus, Lyme Disease, Salmonella,and now likely COVID-19 have in common?

These are all what is known as zoonotic diseases, meaning they can be spread from animals to humans. The majority of these originate in animals,[21] with about 75% of new human pathogens detected in the last 30 years originating in animals. This is particularly insidious because one would think “we have come such a long way since the Bubonic Plague” and so we shouldn’t have to deal with such gruesome diseases and subsequently global pandemics in the twenty-first century. While our ability to combat and globally respond to disease has vastly improved due to a progression in medicine and technology, and sanitation conditions for humanity have improved vastly, unfortunately what is often overlooked in these analyses is the place these diseases originate: animals. Though the conditions of humans are a lot healthier than our ‘wild’ ancestral counterparts, the conditions of animals are often far less healthy than their ‘wild’ ancestors and relatives. Nowhere is this more epitomized than in the factory farm. The factory farm is the perfect breeding ground for a disease.

What conditions would make a perfect breeding ground to cultivate a pandemic disease?

• Extreme confinement (easier to spread from animal to animal)
• Poor sanitation conditions (increased transmission agents and more importantly increased bacteria/virus living grounds)
• Rampant health problems (immunocompromised)
• Genetic uniformity (lack of genetic diversity needed to prevent against disease)

The factory farm excels in all of these criteria.

Animals are confined in extreme proximity, to the point that many animals are unable to even turn around, see the sun once in their entire lives, or breathe fresh air even once.[23] This level of confinement leads to extremely rapid transmission of disease, and occurs on both ‘cruelty-free’ (cage-free, free range, organic, etc) and non-‘cruelty-free’ farms, as this distinction is essentially meaningless and these farms are virtually identical[24], despite what labels would have the consumer think.  While “six feet apart” is our standard for reducing the spread of COVID-19, animals rarely get a single inch apart as they are often crammed in to the point of being on top of other animals. This leads to an incredibly fast transmission rate of disease, as diseases need not even be aerosolized to spread if the animals are constantly touching. This confinement also leads to incredibly poor sanitation conditions.
Animals need to relieve themselves, and animals that can’t move are forced to relieve themselves where they stand, often on top of themselves and other animals. These areas remain largely uncleaned due to the sheer scale of these facilities, leaving animals to live in a mire of feces, vomit, and corpses. It is usually more economically efficient to skimp out on the cleaning, cut corners, let some animals live in disgusting conditions and let some die as a result, than to attempt to remedy the conditions or treat the animals with veterinary care. And due to lack of stringent regulatory guidelines (and in some cases any guidelines) on animal sanitation or living conditions, this is perfectly acceptable. So this is what the factory farms do, as a factory farm works like a factory and pursues profit at all costs. These unsanitary conditions provide far more transmission agents for disease (through feces, urine, …) and also provide a breeding ground for bacteria and viruses as filth is one of the best ways to birth and spread a disease.

Factory farmed animals also suffer a variety of other health ailments, as a result of confinement, unsanitary conditions, noxious chemicals, selective breeding, unhealthy feeding regimens, and mutilation procedures. [23] Confinement often results in physical injury for the animals; some may attack one another as a response to the psychological trauma of lifelong intense confinement and others may experience broken bones from tramples and repeated physical trauma from constant contact with other animals. Unsanitary conditions result in a host of other diseases and infections. Noxious chemicals such as ammonia, used for cleaning, hang in the air permanently and cause respiratory problems such as pneumonia and lung lesions. Unnatural genetically engineered diets of corn and grain (opposed to the natural flora these animals consume in the wild) are not meant to be digested by these animals and directly cause a variety of digestive and respiratory problems. These diets, combined with selective breeding, are in place as a means of growing the animal as fast as possible and as large as possible. This results in the death of oversized babies in factory farms. Many chickens are still making the baby “cheeps” of baby chicks when they walk into the slaughterhouse because they are still babies, grown beyond their years. This expedient growth results in a host of health problems of all kinds: cardiovascular, respiratory, skeletal, digestive, and others. Additionally, many of these animals are mutilated at a young age for purposes of identification, ownership, and removing the ability of these animals to hurt each other. These mutilations involve removing the beak of chickens with a hot blade, the removing of horns of animals with pliers or hot blades, the removing of tails, castration with a knife, and branding, all without anesthesia.

All of these medical conditions are caused by factory farming and all render the animal more prone to infection from future disease, setting the stage for a pandemic.

Selective breeding also has another deadly impact: genetic uniformity and lack of biodiversity. Factory farmers, through massive industrial scale rearing of animals, have eliminated both the diversity in overall species (different types of cows) and the diversity within a single species (differences in individual cows per species).[27][28] This results in genetic uniformity between animals, which is particularly dangerous as genetic biodiversity is a vital vanguard against disease. This is reflected in several comprehensive analyses that show that biodiversity loss results in increased disease transmission.[29] Genetic uniformity renders factory farmed animals especially defenseless against disease; a disease that can infect one animal can now infect them all. 

All of these factors combine to make factory farms one of the best breeding grounds imaginable for a pandemic. And unsurprisingly, they actually have created pandemics, as we have seen animal agriculture in varying levels of industrialization form the genesis of the Nipah virus [15], Swine Flu [19], Avian Flu [17], almost every H5 and H7 Flu [18], and likely even the 1918 Spanish Flu [13]. It was only a matter of time until we saw one arise in the modern era with as deadly a combination of effective transmission and mortality as COVID-19. 

This connection between animal agriculture and pandemics is not a new finding; In 2013, The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations identified the health of livestock in animal agriculture as our “weakest link in the global health chain.”[30] In 2016, scientists were predicting factory farms as “the most likely epicenter of the next pandemic.”[31] 

While we are not currently sure whether animal agriculture is to blame directly for the current pandemic, I can promise you it will be responsible for the next one.

I would now like to address a common counterpoint to the notion of factory farms as the origin of disease. Many people point out: “but a lot of these diseases often originate from wild animals in rural areas, not domesticated animals in industrial animal agriculture plants.” Whether the COVID-19 pandemic even came from the bat in the “wet market” in Wuhan isn’t certain[33], but even if it did, I argue that we should not jump to the conclusion that wild animals are directly to blame for pandemics.
While it is true that a large portion of zoonotic diseases do come from wild animals and not factory farmed animals and on the surface it appears that wild animals are to blame, a deeper look into these transmission scenarios points towards factory farms as the culprit. Industrialized animal agriculture in many countries, including China, has routinely pushed out small local farmers, both economically and geographically. As industrial farm land encroaches on the land of small farmers, small local farmers then must encroach further into “wild” land. Subsequently, the border between human civilization and wild animals is pushed further and further out. This newfound access to wild fauna combined with an industrially dominated animal agriculture market pushes some farmers to begin to hunt and sell “wild” animals in the marketplace to survive economically. The newfound borders between both local farmers and wild animals and industrial animal agriculture and wild animals encourage the spread of disease between these three entities. A deadly scenario appears where zoonotic diseases can grow in the disease-factory known as the factory farm, spread out of the farm into the neighboring wildlife, and then spread from the wildlife to the humans that both live near and hunt them. Thus we see that though not identified as the direct culprit, factory farms do play a direct role in spreading disease into wild animal populations and an indirect role by forcing humans into further contact with wild animals out of geographic and economic necessity. We must tackle the problem at the root: industrialized animal agriculture.

Part 3: Ripples

Beyond facilitating an origination of pandemics, factory farms also facilitate an easy spread of the virus between human beings. The sanitary and respiratory conditions that affect the animals also affect the workers, often causing a variety of health issues in workers. Health issues are not the only plague upon workers, safety issues run rampant as well. The slaughterhouse lines often go so fast that workers don’t have time to sharpen the blades, resulting in dull blade cuts and subsequent worker injury that requires multiple amputations on workers every week in the United States.[34]

The confinement that preys upon the livestock also preys upon the workers; workers are often shoulder-to-shoulder with both fellow workers and animals. These close proximity working conditions, often in areas with the most lax COVID-19 restrictions (as the US midwest has both the most lax restrictions and lots of factory farms) such as South Dakota[35], create one of the most rapid spreading workplaces of COVID-19 in the country.[36] A lot of these workers are from impoverished communities of color, which COVID-19 disproportionately affects in ability to receive and pay for quality health care treatment.[37] Additionally, the economic pressure on impoverished slaughterhouse workers who are routinely paid minimum wage to actually go to work during a pandemic is far higher than that on higher paid workers. This undoubtedly results in more bodies in the factory farms and less people being able to practically “shelter in place” to stave off the spread of COVID-19, regardless of state restrictions. Beyond the obvious ethical conundrums associated with the transmission risk of COVID-19 to factory farm workers, there are also ripple-out effects on the economy as many factory farms have begun to partially or completely close due to the transmission risk.[38] The question is then raised of what to do with the animals in the closed factory farms that don’t have the resources to care for them; the simple answer for many is execution. 

Farmers, without their staff and industry support, are forced to execute their animals in a variety of gruesome ways. One hog farmer in Minnesota “sealed the cracks in his barn and piped carbon dioxide through the ventilation system.”[39] Another shot thousands of pigs in the head, one by one. It took him all day. “There are farmers who cannot finish their sentences when they talk about what they have to do,” stated another Minnesota farmer. Tens of thousands of hens were gassed with carbon dioxide in an egg farm in Minnesota.[40] The psychological consequences of taking such actions for many of these farmers are immense. Millions if not billions of animals will be killed in gruesome ways. This is certainly a tragedy.

The emphasis in the discussion of these vicious executions is often on the element of waste, the fact that the meat will never make it to the consumer’s plate. This is emphasized as the true “crime” here and is the thing that makes the whole thing ‘tragic’. These animals are simply killed because they are leftovers, overflow, surplus that cannot be processed, packaged, and sold. Their bodies will not be food on the consumer’s plate, they will be waste fed into wood chippers. 

But I would like to emphasize a different aspect: the execution itself. What arguably is the sad part that actually resonates with the reader is the vicious execution, not the waste element. However, the narrative of waste is emphasized in these discussions as a means of shifting the discussion away from the ethics of animal execution, which is a tricky topic that implicates systemic societal complicity and is thus thrust out of the public discourse. These animals would have been routinely killed regardless of COVID-19, and the discussion of ethics of execution remains relevant regardless of complicity. If the complaint is with the particular methods of execution, I would argue that the methods described by farmers above are often the exact same methods factory farms usually apply; animals are routinely killed for food in factory farms while still conscious in a variety of inhumane methods such as throat slitting, gas chambers, dismemberment, and more. The only differences between the normal execution and the post-COVID-19 execution are that normally these animals are delivered as meat to the consumer instead of to the ground as waste, and that normally the weight of the psychological trauma of mass murder lands in the minds of the slaughterhouse workers, not the minds of the farm owners. But regardless of the destination of their flesh and who holds the blade, the animals still die the same deaths behind the stone walls of factory farms, their screams never to be heard by the consumer. The key point worth emphasizing is that almost all of these gruesome deaths, both pre-COVID and post-COVID, are preventable with a shift to a plant-based diet.

As our analysis shows the culpability of industrialized animal agriculture, otherwise known as factory farming, in the origination and transmission of COVID-19 and past pandemics, the question becomes not “how did this happen?” but “how did this not happen sooner?” 

We can and must do better. We can and must shift the discussion from a narrative of blame to a narrative of prevention and introduce productive discourse by contemplating our own potential complicity. We can and must tackle the primary underlying cause of pandemics, industrialized animal agriculture, via systemic societal change. The best way to accomplish this is to cut off funding to this industry via an abstention of buying their products, thus shifting towards a plant-based diet. It is necessary for us to do this on an individual level, as the market will only respond to consumer desires in this case; it is simply too big and too integral a part of society to be stopped via regulation and law.

A shift towards a plant-based diet is not only nutritionally adequate for all stages of life but is often healthier than an omnivorous diet. [43]

Such a shift will help prevent funding acts of cruelty such as those mentioned above and will help us globally prevent the current leading factor in the creation of pandemics.

I urge you to please consider making such a change in your personal life, if you are able, as it is the strongest action we can take on an individual level to prevent further disasters wrought by animal agriculture. These disasters are not inevitable and you are not powerless; you can make an impact today with a dietary change. I ask you to consider it.

These are just some of the ways pandemics, the animal agriculture industry, and xenophobia intersect in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you for reading. Feel free to subscribe for more pieces like this one and to comment your thoughts below.

Special thanks to Mexie’s video essay [44] and Leah Garcés’s article [45] for providing inspiration for this piece.

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Resources Cited

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[38] Corkery, Michael, and David Yaffe-Bellany. 2020. “The Food Chain’s Weakest Link: Slaughterhouses.” The New York Times. The New York Times. April 18. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/business/coronavirus-meat-slaughterhouses.html.

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[40] Polansek, Tom, and P.J. Huffstutter. 2020. “Piglets Aborted, Chickens Gassed as Pandemic Slams Meat Sector.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters. April 28. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-livestock-insight/piglets-aborted-chickens-gassed-as-pandemic-slams-meat-sector-idUSKCN2292YS.

[41] Image from https://www.four-paws.us/campaigns-topics/topics/farm-animals/cage-free

[42] Image from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2020/02/deadly-viral-outbreaks-originated-animals-200205173647803.html, CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0

[43] “Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets.” 2009. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 109 (7): 1266–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jada.2009.05.027.

[44] Mexie. 2020. “Speciesism, Capitalism, and Pandemics (ft. Kathrin)” Aug 12, 2020. Video, 26:47. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh1nfxapkM0

[45] Garcés, Leah. 2020. “COVID-19 Exposes Animal Agriculture’s Vulnerability.” Agriculture and Human Values 37 (3): 621–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10099-5.