A Pandemic-Free Future Means No Industrial Animal Agriculture
Our food system is broken, and in need of a collective mending. As a first step to redeeming ourselves, industrial animal agriculture must be removed. It is an anachronism.
ANNE ELLIOT: COVID-19, unseen, all-powerful, the taker of lives, ignoring geographical boundaries, has been the creator of much moral discomfort. And forces us to think outside the box, to review everything we thought we knew, even mundane activities, like animal agriculture. Ideally, can we prevent pandemics at the source?…
While the race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 continues, it is obvious we cannot vaccinate ourselves against everything. Surely focusing on the source/s of pandemics is also important… Chickens and pigs are commonly raised on factory farms and of all animals eaten for meat, amongst the most-consumed. Chickens at a molecular level, have a respiratory tract like ours.
Does this make the transfer of viruses to humans easier? 50 billion chickens a year are slaughtered for food on a planet where it is estimated the entire human population that has ever lived is around 108 billion. This in itself, is a nightmare-inducing statistic. Globally, the consumption of pigs too is steadily rising. They are capable of being infected with both avian and human virus strains. Pigs are also an intermediary in the transfer of viruses. H1N1 (Swine Flu) and H5N1 (Bird Flu) evolved on chickens and pigs.
Reputable bodies such as WHO, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have warned that most emerging infectious diseases come from animals. The American Public Health Association some years ago even called for a moratorium on factory farming. These warnings have been ignored… Covid19 will not be our last pandemic. We must treat the source…
Factory farms with genetically-altered animals fed artificial diets, closely-confined and highly-stressed, provide perfect, ongoing opportunities for viruses to leap, via a compromised human host, and transcend the species barrier. This has already happened. In 2009, Swine Flu on pig farms in Northern America jumped to humans, with that novel virus becoming a global pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of people…
We need to consider the health of both wild and domestic animals if we are going to prevent pandemics. This will also include instigating major rewilding projects and the banning of wet markets trading in wild animals/exotic animals for food or as exotic pets… A logical extension of this is the realization that industrial animal agriculture is simply too risky to continue. We need to put in place immediate incentivized global dismantling measures.
Paradoxically, the rising global consumption of meat demands that this should be so. Industrial animal agriculture is modern agriculture at its most grotesque, driven by profits. It is a flimsy, unsustainable system. While the human population has doubled in the last 50 years, our consumption of meat has tripled. Our forests have diminished, our wildlife forced from habitats. Our greed is out of control…
Where do we go from here? Our food system is broken. We need a collective mending of our food system. Many alternatives exist: plant-based meats, cellular meats, other emerging sustainable proteins such as algae, and air proteins. We could give greater support to small-scale, sustainable producers, and regenerative agriculture…
It all comes back to attitude, vision, a global mind sensing the crisis we are in and then decisively putting in place the necessary actions. If we don’t, civilization as we know it runs the risk of collapsing or ceasing to exist at all: Mother Earth’s final revenge! As a first step to redeeming ourselves, the Earth, our Mother, is telling us very loudly industrial animal agriculture must be removed. It is an anachronism. SOURCE…
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