Morning-Joe and LA Times deal strongly with the Covid link to animal treatment 4/2 - 4/6/2020

Greetings from Santa Barbara! The exact spot I have landed in may be temporary but the move to the town itself is likely long term. It's heavenly here.

Over the past week, animal news, like all other news, has been largely Covid related, the exception being talk of Tiger King, which I will tackle later this week. The Los Angeles Times has been particularly strong on Covid, with both an op-ed and a front page story focusing on the connection between treatment of animals and disease spread. I will share those below. But first, this morning, Monday April 6, on MSNBC's Morning Joe we saw "Dr. Peter Li, Kitty Block of the Humane Society of the United States and Gene Baur of Farm Sanctuary discuss Dr. Fauci's calls to close down Chinese wet markets."

I highly recommend you watch the superb segment on line at:
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/pressure-builds-on-china-as-calls-to-close-wet-markets-grow-81692741609
OR https://tinyurl.com/svmf9c9

In it, Baur notes that there are scores of those live markets in New York City and also that factory farms are similar breeding grounds for disease.

The best possible positive feedback we can offer is to share the story widely. Click on "share this" just underneath it. It is helpful to tag the show or the anchors.
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The Thursday, April 2, Los Angeles Times op-ed by Viveca Morris, executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School, it titled, "How humans created a pandemic 'highway'; The coronavirus shows that what we're doing to animals is killing us, too."

It tells us, "About two-thirds of emerging infectious diseases in humans -- including COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, Zika, H1N1, cholera and almost all recent epidemics -- came from animals."

Morris describes the danger of live markets in China (which also exist in US Chinatowns) where numerous species that would never meet in the wild are packed in together but she notes:

Every year, Americans pay to capture, box up and import hundreds of millions of live animals for agriculture, the pet and aquarium industries and other uses.

"Inevitably, some of these traded animals carry hitchhiking pathogens or disturb their new environments in ways that amplify disease risk."

She gives examples, and then writes:

"And then we have the bio-catastrophes that are modern factory farms. We pack most of the world's livestock animals, for all or part of their lives, into crammed living conditions that are hotbeds for viral and bacterial pathogens, and then we lace their feed with the world's most medically important antibiotics, creating perfect conditions for antibiotic-resistant pathogens to develop. The public pays the price in the form of drug-resistant UTI and MRSA infections, feces in the air and water, and increased risk of deadly viral epidemics like the 2009 H1N1 outbreak that sickened an estimated 59 million people.

"To prevent future outbreaks like COVID-19 or worse, we have to treat planetary, animal and human health as inseparable. This will require radical changes to business as usual."

You'll find the full piece online at
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-pandemics-animals-habitat-ecology
OR https://tinyurl.com/uzywkcd

While the points Morris makes should all encourage us to treat animals differently, the piece only indirectly addresses their suffering but it opens the door for letters that speak for animals more directly.

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Then Sunday's front page article, by Alice Su, tells us that China has banned "wildlife trade and consumption," though, "it has not yet been enshrined in the Wildlife Protection Law."

And importantly:

"The ban covers only land animals. It punishes consumers but does not tackle corrupt ties among government officials, corporate interests and 'breeders' who use permits as a cover for illegal trade.

"And it leaves a glaring loophole by allowing continued use of wildlife for traditional Chinese medicine, including animal-based remedies that national health authorities are now prescribing as treatment for the coronavirus. Current law permits the farming of bats, pangolins and bears to make medicine from their feces, scales and bile, which drives the demand for wildlife and raises the risk of another pandemic."

With regard to bear bile, we read later in the article:

"The latest edition of China's national guidelines for COVID-19 treatment recommends a traditional Chinese medicine called tan re jing. Its main ingredient is bear bile, a liquid harvested from the gallbladders of bears kept in captivity. Techniques range from inserting rubber or metal tubes through a bear's abdomen to cutting a permanent hole in the bear so its bile can "free-drip" for collection."

The article explains:

"Under China's Wildlife Protection Law, enacted in 1989 and most recently amended in 2018, wild animals, including endangered species, can be farmed and traded by purveyors with government permits, usually granted by provincial authorities.

"Conservation groups say the permit system masks the illegal hunting and trading, including species on the brink of extinction. There are now fewer than 4,000 wild tigers worldwide, for example -- a 96% decrease in population since the start of the 20th century -- while China has at least 6,000 captive tigers in farms, according to animal rights groups."

Su discusses problems with the China Wildlife Conservation Assn., or CWCA, which has Chinese-medicine producers on its board and which has been known to push the breeding of wildlife.

She ends with:

"The question, according to conservationists, is whether Beijing will protect the interests of a multibillion-dollar industry that the state has promoted for years, or the lives of those it has endangered: dozens of animal species and billions of humans now exposed to COVID-19, including tens of thousands who have died.

"Whether the planet can reduce the risk of another pandemic will depend on what China chooses."

That ending, putting everything on China, contradicts Viveca Morris's opinion piece from Friday, which owns the immense danger posed by our own factory farms. But the article includes much important information. You'll find it online at:

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-04-02/why-china-wildlife-ban-not-enough-stop-coronavirus-outbreak
OR https://tinyurl.com/ulgvw3p

Either or both of the articles serve as the perfect launch point for letters to the editor dealing with our relationships with other species and advocating compassion.

The Los Angeles Times takes letters at
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/submit-letter-to-the-editor

Yours and all animals',
Karen Dawn of DawnWatch
https://DawnWatch.com