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…

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: President Trump’s recent use of the Defense Production Act to order slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants to stay open is misunderstood if viewed only as the next tragic misstep in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It marks the nadir of the increasingly broken meat industry. For years, we have knowingly destroyed our planet for the sake of a protein preference. Now, we are sending humans to their deaths. Trump’s “order” was, in fact, the result of meat industry executives requesting his relief from legal liability for worker deaths. The number of…

SIGAL SAMUEL: Some experts have hypothesized that the novel coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans in China’s wet markets, just like SARS before it. Unsurprisingly, many people are furious that the markets, which were closed in the immediate wake of the outbreak in China, are already reopening. It’s easy to point the finger at these “foreign” places and blame them for generating pandemics. But doing that ignores one crucial fact: The way people eat all around the world — including in the US — is a major risk factor for pandemics, too. That’s because we eat a ton of meat, and the…

PETA: What do top U.S. papers The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, the Washington Examiner, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today have in common? They’re all printing urgent, full-page warnings from PETA about the dangers of slaughterhouses... U.S. farms and slaughterhouses are as filthy as China’s “wet markets,” where it’s believed the COVID-19 pandemic began. Their floors are splattered with blood, urine, feces, and entrails. As long as slaughterhouses remain open, millions of animals will…

MIKKO JARVENPAA: What are our duties towards others, especially those who are less fortunate than us? Who are such others, and how can we do the most good for them? Philosopher Peter Singer has worked on such questions for decades. Singer is one of the most influential ethicists in the world and has gained this highly visible and sometimes controversial standing due to his focus on two major areas: the lives of non-human animals, and questions concerning human lives at the margins of human experience. Since the first publication of his book Animal Liberation in 1975, Singer has been a key…

JIM CRAMER: It's not a hobby, it's an ethos. That's it. That's Beyond Meat (BYND) , that's plant based, that's Ethan Brown, that's buy buy buy. I have to tell you that so many things have been accelerated by the pandemic that you can't help but wonder, are young stock buyers even caring about the short-term fundamentals? Or are they just plain true believers and therefore they can buy with reckless abandon. And one of the most important? That we can't trust the food chain anymore. That it's dirty, broken, and sinful. So we have to buy Beyond Meat, the plant based burgers that don't involve…

CHRIS TAYLOR: Picture two industries. One is increasingly associated in the consumer's mind with dirt and disease. Not only is much of its product pumped full of antibiotics and covered in fecal matter, not only does it come with an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer, but now its workers are testing positive for coronavirus in droves, and its supply chain is in pain. The other industry makes a product that many consumers find just as tasty as the first industry's product, but without the health risks. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, this industry is having no trouble…

FRANCES MARTEL: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has launched an international petition urging the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) to call for the end of “wet markets” in response to the current Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which may have originated in one. The president of PETA, Ingrid E. Newkirk, also sent a letter addressed to W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in March encouraging him and his organization to “call for the closure of all live-animal meat markets worldwide to prevent the next outbreak"... “To protect the public, W.H.O. needs to act…

ASSOCIATED PRESS: The World Health Organization said that although a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan selling live animals likely played a significant role in the emergence of the new coronavirus, it does not recommend that such markets be shut down globally. In a press briefing, WHO food safety and animal diseases expert Peter Ben Embarek said live animal markets are critical to providing food and livelihoods for millions of people globally and that authorities should focus on improving them rather than outlawing them — even though they can sometimes spark epidemics in humans. “Food…

ANTONIA SHANN: Meat-eating is taking a toll on the environment, human health, and animal welfare. But with global population and wealth on the rise, meat-eating may skyrocket by as much as 76% by 2050 – at a time when we desperately need to cut back. This study set out to examine what role the media might play in promoting a shift toward more sustainable diets, and what kind of messaging would be most effective in what cultural contexts... The study focused on four countries: the U.K., U.S., China, and Brazil... During the study, researchers gave participants information about the link…