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A market selling wild animals was the probable source of the current pandemic. How dangerous is China’s wildlife trade?
Was a market definitely the source?
It seems likely. Some, including President Trump, appear to believe that the virus escaped from a virus laboratory in Wuhan (see box). However, the evidence suggests otherwise. Of the first 41 people hospitalised by Covid-19 in Wuhan late last year, 27 had direct exposure to a wet market, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Traces of the virus were found in 33 samples taken there. The related virus that caused the 2002 Sars outbreak likely originated in bats, but was passed to humans via racoon-like civet cats sold in wildlife markets. Scientists had warned repeatedly of a likely recurrence. In 2007, a University of Hong Kong paper stated that “the presence of a large reservoir of Sars-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China, is a time bomb”. Genetic tests on the Covid-19 virus suggest it reached humans by a similar route.
What exactly is a wet market?
Although in the West the term has become synonymous with the wildlife trade, wet markets are, by and large, normal markets of a kind found all over Asia and beyond, where traders sell meat, fish and fresh fruit and vegetables. They are “wet” because produce is washed and floors are frequently hosed down. Many older Chinese people prefer to buy “warm meat” – transported live and slaughtered to order – over the chilled or frozen kind, believing it to be safer and tastier. While some markets are unsanitary by Western standards, most do not trade in exotic animals.
But wild animals are offered for sale in some?
Yes. In the western zone of Huanan market in Wuhan, around 75 species of living and recently slaughtered exotic species were sold: including snakes, civet cats, beavers, peacocks, bamboo rats, wolf pups, turtles, otters, and possibly pangolins (scaly mammals, prized for their scales and meat, whose sale is banned). The trade in “wildlife” – much of it actually farmed – is big in China, worth more than $74bn and employing 14 million people in 2017, according to a government report.
What are wild animals used for?
They are prized for two main reasons. Diners in southern China have long enjoyed eating wild and exotic game, sometimes boasting they will “eat anything with four legs except a table”. Ye wei (wild taste) game is a status symbol in China, with a prestige linked to the serving of exotic animals at imperial-era banquets; the meat is also believed to have therapeutic benefits. The trade’s other main driver is the use of animal parts and substances in traditional Chinese medicine. Pangolin scales, snake bile and bat faeces are all used in such medicines. As recently as March, the Chinese government approved the use of an injection containing bear bile to treat – of all things – coronavirus. The claimed medicinal qualities of pangolins have made them the most common illegally-traded wild mammal in the world.
Why is this dangerous?
According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 75% of all new and emerging diseases are zoonotic: they cross the species barrier from animals to humans. Examples include HIV, Ebola, Marburg haemorrhagic fever, West Nile virus, Nipah virus – and Sars, Mers and Covid-19. This process is driven mainly by the encroachment of humans into previously unexploited land, and the sale of wild animals. Wildlife markets – where stressed live animals, often ill, are stacked in cages, metres from butchers going about their business – could hardly be designed better to transmit disease. Pangolins, now critically endangered in China, are trafficked from all over Asia and Africa; and studies have found a coronavirus in lung samples of Malayan pangolins, which was very similar to the Covid-19 virus.
Have wildlife markets been banned?
In February, China’s National People’s Congress issued a decree “comprehensively prohibiting the illegal trade of wild animals” and “eliminating the bad habits of wild animal consumption”. It also banned the farming of wild animals. Some 20,000 farms raising species including civet cats, wild geese and porcupines – until recently promoted by the state – have been closed down. Yet China has had wildlife protection laws on its books since the 1980s, to little effect; a similar ban was enacted after Sars, but later rescinded. There is also one glaring loophole: the law allows the continued use of wildlife for Chinese medicine. The farming of bears, bats and pangolins for such purposes is permitted, and campaigners say this business gives cover for the illegal trade.
Is there strong international pressure on this issue?
The US State Department has called on China to permanently close its wildlife markets; a group of US senators called for all wet markets to be shut. Politicans, health experts and opinion-makers around the world have echoed these calls. (Paul McCartney also weighed in, calling wet markets “medieval” and obscene, and saying: “they might as well be letting off atomic bombs”.) There is perhaps an element of racism in the disgust provoked by Chinese eating habits. Taboos on eating certain kinds of food are viscerally felt, and not always rational. Intensive farming of chickens, for instance, is known to be a major incubator of disease, but doesn’t evoke the same horror.
Will the situation improve?
Wet markets are a major part of Chinese culture, and are likely to remain so. But “the coronavirus epidemic is swiftly pushing China to re-evaluate its relationship with wildlife”, says Steve Blake of the charity WildAid. Chinese eating habits have certainly changed in response to educational campaigns. For instance, the market for shark fins has dropped 80% in three years, mostly because of a public campaign warning about the environmental cost of shark fin soup, previously seen as a status symbol.