The coronavirus outbreak highlights the urgency of banning the trade in wildlife and preventing endangered creatures from ending up on the dinner table, as well as the need to revise the Wildlife Protection Law
Liu Yidan, a wildlife protection volunteer, had already received a tipoff about illegal practices at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in December 2019, just as the first reports of a new SARS-like disease were starting to trickle out.
Lots of exotic wild animals were being illegally sold as food, the informer told her. Liu was unable to go to Wuhan to see for herself at the time. But other online posts were accusing the market of trading in many kinds of animals, including dogs and cats, as well as more exotic species such as pheasants, snakes, marmots, sika deer and monkeys, all under the guise of selling seafood.
But on December 31 when NewsChina arrived at the wet market, it was business as usual, despite reports that a “pneumonia from an unknown cause” was already infecting residents in Wuhan. The outbreak reportedly centered on people who had direct contact with the market. Yet stallholders insisted to the reporters that there were no live animals in the market except seafood. As of press time, more than 2,400 people have died and more than 77,000 have been diagnosed with Covid-19. The majority of the earliest confirmed cases reportedly involved direct contact with the market.
On January 22, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a press conference that the novel coronavirus was suspected of originating at the Huanan Seafood Market and wild animals played a key role. Zhong Nanshan, a senior specialist from the National Health Commission of China, said in a China Central Television (CCTV) interview that the source of the virus might be wild animals like bamboo rats or badgers. Other Chinese research has since pointed to pangolins, the most trafficked animal in the world, and widely used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), according to media reports.
There has been a massive public backlash against China’s wildlife trade and the habits of some who eat wild animals, whether legally or illegally traded, although some scientists have claimed the seafood market might not be the only source of the virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2. Volunteers like Liu, who have long been battling the poaching and trading of wild animals, say that authorities should act quickly to fast-track legislation that puts an end to illegal hunting and sales of exotic species for good.
As soon as the extent of the problem became clear, authorities banned the trade and transportation of farmed wildlife on January 26. Conservationists and the public lauded the ban, although it was announced as only temporary, until the crisis was over. Many said the ban was only a stopgap measure, and the root of the problem lies in China’s Wildlife Protection Law. Some accused the law of putting more emphasis on the legal utilization of wild animals than their protection, which means it fails to effectively crack down on illegal hunting and trade as the legal trade provides cover for those that engage in illegal practices. There is wide consensus that this fatal outbreak makes it is urgent to revise the law.
A poll by the Peking University Center for Nature Society on January 28 had attracted nearly 93,000 participants by February 12, with 97 percent of respondents “strongly” against eating wild animals, nearly 78 percent against using wildlife products including fur, bone and medicine, and 77 percent against the domestication of wildlife on farms, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
“Epidemic diseases originate from wild animals and once they occur, are hard to control and have severe consequences. The Wildlife Protection Law should be revised to strictly prohibit hunting and eating wild animals to prevent such diseases,” Liu Xiaoyu, an expert from the CDC had already warned.
On February 10, Wang Ruihe, an official with the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, said at a press conference in Beijing that the central government intends to make efforts to accelerate the amendment of laws on animal epidemic prevention and other areas, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Wang stressed the need to improve laws and regulations related to wildlife, tighten supervision over law enforcement and toughen the crackdown on wildlife trafficking.
Police in Jiangcheng county, Yunnan Province seized several macaques up for sale and slaughter on October 27, 2014
Stalls at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei Province were open as usual on December 31, 2019
After Huanan Seafood Market was finally closed on January 1, Chinese epidemiologists conducted sample testing of aquatic shop owners. The trade in wildlife at the market, despite the stallholders’ denials, was highly suspected to be related to the outbreak. On January 26, the CDC said it had found new coronavirus nucleic acids in 33 out of the 585 environmental samples from the market and successfully isolated the virus from the samples, hinting that the virus originated from wild animals sold in the market.
Huanan Seafood Market, one of the largest aquatic product wholesale markets in Central China, has attracted numerous complaints from nearby residents for its stinking environment full of garbage and sewage. They were ignored. In 2004, not long after the SARS outbreak of 2002-3, the market already aroused controversy over selling masked palm civets, hosts of the SARS virus. Official data attributes 774 deaths to SARS, with 8,098 infected worldwide. A netizen nicknamed “Malaxiaolongxia” posted on Sina Weibo that he was a middle school student then, and passed the market every day. There he saw an array of wild animals for sale, including crocodiles, pheasants, masked palm civets, peacocks and others he could not name, and “most of them were alive.”
Despite complaints dating back over a decade, the wildlife business seemed unaffected. “The wildlife dealers could do this business in the name of seafood. They usually have stable underground channels for sales,” said Tian Jiangming (pseudonym), who has devoted himself to wildlife protection for years. He said three of the eight major global bird migration routes pass China, and Chinese bird hunters prey on all of them. Many of their illegal catches found their way to the Huanan Seafood Market.
The wild animals traded there go far beyond birds. A widely circulated price list of a shop from the market offers nearly 100 kinds of wild animals, each having a price. The shop, which opened in 2004, again in the wake of the SARS epidemic, promised that these animals all could be “freshly killed.”
Statistics released by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) in 2018 showed that in Hubei Province, there were some 500 companies engaged in the captive breeding of wild animals, involving more than 60 species, with an annual yield totaling 300 million yuan (US$43m).
In Wuhan, it is easy to find restaurants with wild animals offered as specialties.
Yue Hua, a volunteer for a bird protection NGO, visited Wuhan in 2019 and saw many restaurants selling wild animals in the downtown area. “The fact that they can sell game dishes in the downtown reflectsthat it is common to eat wild animals in the local area and the supervision is rather slack,” Yue told NewsChina.
The Covid-19 outbreak has wide parallels with the SARS epidemic. Most of the first patients diagnosed with SARS were found to have had direct contact with wild animals. After scientists isolated the SARS virus from masked palm civets, authorities in Guangdong Province where the virus was thought to have originated culled all masked palm civets in wildlife markets, banned the wildlife trade and closed the markets.
Thirteen years later, a team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences led by Shi Zhengli discovered the same virus in bats in Yunnan Province, pinpointing the origin even further. Civets were an intermediate host, with bats regarded as the source, or natural host, of SARS-related viruses. Bats are believed to be the most likely reservoir of many lethal viruses in the past 50 years.
These viruses are described as zoonotic – that is they can jump the species barrier, passing from animal to animal and on to humans. These include Ebola, the Nipah virus, which spreads from fruit bats and pigs, the Hendra, a rare zoonotic disease also deriving from bats, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), which likely comes from camels. Bats are likely the original source of Covid-19, according to Chinese scientists.
In China, bats, along with many other species, are used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM.) Bats are seen as being helpful to treat eye problems and coughs. They are also eaten.
Most wild animal eaters are evidently unaware that the animals are repositories for pathogens in nature. Qin Chuan, director of the Institute of Laboratory Animal Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, wrote in an article published in the journal Laboratory Animal and Comparative Medicine in 2008, that since 2001, over 70 percent of the 1,100 infectious diseases with global impact confirmed by the WHO are zoonotic. The article pointed out that bats, rats, birds, snakes, frogs and shellfish are all common reservoirs for emerging infectious diseases.
“People have never learned the lesson that they shouldn’t eat wild animals,” said Gao Xi, a history professor at the Shanghai-based Fudan University. In 1988, eating blood clams was found to have caused a Hepatitis A outbreak in Shanghai that infected about 300,000 people. In 2019, a couple was poisoned to death after eating half-cooked internal organs of marmots in Mongolia.
Following the SARS outbreak, Guangdong killed tens of thousands of masked palm civets for safety concerns. But the ban lasted only a while. In August 2004, just three months after the SARS crisis ended, the NFGA released a list of 54 kinds of terrestrial wild animals which contended that the taming and breeding technology were mature enough to support their commercial utilization. Masked palm civets were among them.
Some memories were short. Not long after the SARS outbreak ended in June 2003, wild animals were back on the menu. In 2004, there were more than 16,000 breeding farms for wild animals, worth an annual 20 billion yuan (US$2.9b), reported the Guangming Daily.
The market in Wuhan is an epitome of the enthusiasm for eating wild animals nationwide. Masked palm civets, bats, bamboo rats, pangolins and porcupines were the most searched animals for eating in the past 10 years, according to a Covid-19-related big data report published by Chinese tech giant Baidu on January 31.
And tastes change from place to place. In Guangdong, for example, people prefer bamboo rats, rice birds and pangolins, believing that pangolin meat helps stimulate breast milk production. In Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, people like dried meat from wild birds, saying soup made of the meat is nutritious and good for newborn babies. In northeastern China, bear’s paw, roe deer and wild boars are more common on the dinner table.
In many areas, particularly those with a tradition of eating wildlife, it is believed that game meat is more delicious or nutritious, with particular medical functions. But it is also common for people to eat wild animals simply driven by vanity, seeing it as a symbol of privilege to show off their wealth.
Students from Hubei University raise awareness of wildlife protection at Jiufeng Forest Zoo in Wuhan, Hubei Province
People are now pushing for changes to China’s Wildlife Protection Law, which many experts regard as not harsh enough to curb the chaos in wildlife hunting, breeding and trade that helps lead wild animals to the nation’s dinner tables.
The current law mainly was revised in 2016, the draft of which once aroused controversy in legal and wildlife protection circles. Many believed the draft deemed wild animals as a kind of economic resource and acknowledged the legitimacy of this trade. According to utilization articles of the law, whether wild animals are under State protection or not, they all can be hunted, tamed or exploited after certain regulated requirements are met, which includes gaining licenses from authorities. In recent years, breeding wild animals that are not under State protection but have biological, scientific and economic value is particularly encouraged in some places for economic output.
But these licenses sometimes are mere cover for illegal hunting and trade. The wild animals, whether gained through poaching or other illegal means, become “legalized” once they are put into the hands of people with licenses.
“On the one hand, it [the law] seems to have more strict requirements for the sake of protection. On the other, it marks a step forward in allowing the commercial use of wildlife. The balance is maintained only by the vague and fragile line of legality,” Liang Zhiping, director of the Hongfan Institute of Legal & Economic Studies, said in an article published in December 2016 which offered a critical analysis of loopholes in the Wildlife Protection Law.
In China, game meats are more popular in the south, so wild animals are mainly transported from north to south. The wild animals poached in the north, where the locals consume little, are usually sent to the south, mainly to Guangdong which is the distribution center for wild animals, conservation volunteers told NewsChina.
A nationwide profit chain has formed surrounding the resale of poached animals, according to an article published on the WeChat account of wildlife protection NGO the Beijing Prairie League Environmental Protection Promotion Center on January 22. Poachers sell the animals to middle men, who sell them to bigger buyers. The big buyers usually have licenses to breed wild animals and thus can whitewash the illegally hunted or purchased animals and then send them to markets openly.
“The law encourages people to breed and utilize, but many wild animals can’t be bred, and some are bred at huge cost. Take bar-headed geese. They do not lay eggs until being bred for four or five years and the production is low. So bar-headed geese [eggs] are usually stolen from the wild,” Liu Yidan said, adding that the criminality is all to disguise the source of wild animals sold in markets.
The protection of wild animals not under State protection is weak, which puts volunteers engaged in wildlife protection in awkward situations. In January 2017, thanks to Liu’s activism, nearly 900 wild animals were found in a market in Tianjin, including wild rabbits, wild ducks and wild leopard cats. But the dealers involved were not held accountable, as the seized animals come under the category of wild animals valuable for biology, scientific research and the economy but do not come under special State protection.
There are relatively strict regulations about animals under special State protection, but for wild animals such as masked palm civets, badgers and hedgehogs which are listed, illegal hunting and [non-compliant behavior] in breeding and operations are very severe, said Lü Zhi, a conservation biologist from Peking University, in an interview with the Worker’s Daily in mid-February.
The deadly outbreak has prompted many to say it is past time to revise the law. “Generally speaking, the threshold for breeding wild animals should be very high. And I strongly oppose eating them,” Lü told NewsChina. She said that eating wildlife is an outdated habit that society should abandon.
According to the current law, eating wild animals under State protection is prohibited. Lü believes the ban should expand to all wild animals, advocating a “complete ban on eating wild animals.”
“In picking a host, pathogens don’t care if an animal is protected or not. Ironically, animals that are not under special State protection, including masked palm civets, bats and hedgehogs, have become natural or intermediate hosts for diseases that plague both animals and human beings,” Lü said.
On January 23, initiated by Lü, 19 academicians and scholars from universities and research institutes signed a letter calling on lawmakers to make quick amendments to the Wildlife Protection Law and fit public health considerations into articles regarding wild animal utilization.
“Changes in the law will help regulate and guide people’s behavior as the bottom line, though real changes have to come from changes in attitude,” Lü said. She believes that from SARS-CoV to SARS-CoV-2, nature is continuing to remind human society of the importance of rebuilding reverence for nature and keeping the balance between human beings and nature, and between human beings, wild animals and pathogens. “Otherwise, the health risk will be beyond measure,” she said.