China and its exotic-animal wet markets are incubators of human diseases like coronavirus

In the mid-2000s I was a journalist based in Shanghai and I came upon what seemed like a great story idea.

China’s economic rise had created a fascinating dynamic with the animal realm. While a growing middle class had started having pets (which were frowned upon in the recent past as a bourgeois luxury), attitudes generally towards animals were lagging far behind economic growth, to say the least.

Withno animal welfare law in all of China, abuses towards animals went unpunished.  A fetish site at the time that featured women in stiletto heels crushing kittens caused an uproar, but it couldn’t be formally punished. Similarly, some had started speaking out about certain traditional Chinese medicine practices, like imprisoning moon bears in tiny cages with catheters inserted in their livers to extract bile (which has dubious benefits and can be easily synthesized chemically), but the practice went on unimpeded. 

But it was Chinese eating habits that really captured my attention.

Unique conditions for human sickness 

I started covering the story not long after the SARS crisis had subsided. I made my way south to Guangdong, where there is a saying that the locals will eat “anything that flies except a plane, and anything with four legs except a table.” The infamous wet markets, which sold a huge variety of exotic animal species like porcupines, raccoons and otters, had been temporarily cowed by a government clampdown when I first began to investigate this story. These shutdowns would unfortunately prove to be short-lived.

These wet markets were reported to have been the birthplace for SARS and now, science tells us, are the possible origin of COVID-19, which started supposedly with the consumption of pangolin or bats kept along with other wildlife in unsanitary conditions in Wuhan’s wet markets. When I visited the markets, the strangest animals for human consumption to my western eyes were turtles, snakes and frogs. Gone were the civet cats (who likely passed SARS to humans), wolf cubs, monkeys and many other exotic animals, which until recently were sold openly.

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But even with clampdown at the time, it wasn’t hard to connect with people who whispered of the horrifying conditions that the market operated under. Before SARS, the markets were a Noah’s Ark of terrified animals of seemingly every variety, often sick and/or injured, housed closely together before being slaughtered in unsanitary conditions. It was a perfect birthplace for novel viruses to intermingle and leap and mutate to humans.

I would later learn that the Chinese appetite for these animals and the conditions they were kept in weren’t the only genesis for disease creation in China. Chinese animal husbandry practices were such that people frequently lived in close proximity with their livestock, often keeping these animals in their homes. In fact, the traditional character for home, jia, features a pig under a roof, which shows just how elemental this type of arrangement has been in Chinese culture. Pigs, like birds, have a distinct biological ability to share their viruses with humans compared to other animals.

The combination of living closely with animals, in particular animals that can share their diseases with humans, with a centuries-old tradition of eating strange animals and/or using them for medical purposes, combined with unsanitary conditions, created a uniquely fecund environment for human sickness.

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As if this wasn’t bad enough, it was easy to find a level of cruelty towards animals that was shocking. In Beijing — where pet dogs had been abandoned en masse by their owners when false rumors circulated that dogs could carry SARS — I met a man who had dogs he was ready to sell as pets and others he would happily slaughter for dinner. Cat meatball restaurants weren’t all that hard to find in Shenzhen. Seemingly every seafood market featured fish that had been cut open alive and placed on ice to show hearts still beating to prove how fresh they were.

Rising wealth in China had led to rapid and massive growth of industrial meat production, which, combined with no animal welfare law, created horrible conditions for billions of animals. Desire for shark fin soup — which has little natural taste and is simply a status symbol — was threatening to wipe out the global shark population. The list went on and on.

I left China partly over animal horrors 

It is said that a society’s attitude towards animals is often a bellwether for its sense of justice and kindness. I found these attributes sorely lacking in China and after a few years decided to leave, in no small part because of the horrors I uncovered while doing research for my animal welfare story.

Now we’re faced with the uniquely devastating challenge of COVID-19. Senior leaders in the U.S. government, led by President Donald Trump, have taken to calling it “the Chinese virus,” or variations thereof. This should be loudly condemned as it has led to racial targeting of Asian-Americans. It is also a diversionary tactic to distract from the incompetent response by the Trump administration, whose desire to scapegoat foreigners is at this point both unsurprising yet still shockingly irresponsible behavior in the midst of a crisis.

But we shouldn’t let our impulse to defend our fellow citizens from racist attacks, or our understandable desire to stand in opposition to the foolish rhetoric of right-wing voices, get in the way of condemning China’s tolerance of these animal welfare practices, and in demanding that China finally end the most dangerous of these practices.

A growing chorus of critics is focused specifically on the wet markets. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, saying recently that the pandemic is a “direct result” of the conditions found at the wet markets. "It boggles my mind how when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we don't just shut it down," he said.

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For centuries foreigners have tried to change China. But Chinese culture has largely resisted the missionaries and businessmen that have sought to convert its people and capitalize on its huge market. Now the world needs to unite and push China to change for an extremely important global public health reason — not for profit or proselytizing.

To be fair, wet markets like the one in Wuhan exist in other countries. But it is the scale of China and the combination of its cultural traditions of medicine, animal husbandry and culinary tastes that render it a unique incubator of terrible diseases.

As we all do our best to get through this crisis, we can’t lose sight of how we got here. China knew after SARS that its wet markets were a specific danger to public health and allowed them to resume after that particular crisis died down. Since that time many have predicted that these wet markets were a ticking time bomb for another novel virus. We will need to work worldwide to hold China accountable in making sure these markets are changed permanently. They can no longer disregard the scientific facts that tell us mixing exotic animals — and eating them — isn’t just bad for wildlife, it is human kryptonite.

Jeremy Hurewitz, the Curation Director at NationSwell, was a journalist based in Prague and Shanghai for nine years.