Covid-19 Was Preventable!

 

Zoonotic diseases, the cause of most epidemics and pandemics, including Covid-19, are caused by human – animal interaction.  The most serious infectious diseases are zoonotic, causing an estimated 3 million human deaths per year even before the current Covid-19 pandemic.  Zoonotic disease is caused by a pathogen that “spills over”, from animals to humans.  Infections are then transmitted directly among humans.

Emerging diseases are almost invariably zoonotic.  An estimated 60% of all viruses that infect humans came from animals, and 75% of all new infectious diseases in the past decade are zoonotic.  Examples include Covid-19, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Ebola virus, SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, and Avian Flu, and many others including the deadliest pandemics in history: Black Death, Spanish Flu, HIV, and now Covid-19. 

The global rate of zoonotic disease is increasing.  Without understanding the creation of zoonoses - abuse and exploitation of the non-human species buy the human speciesism, including eating them, wearing them, using them for entertainment, and unnecessary tests, or Speciesism, and rectifying these issues, it is impossible to prevent the next pandemic. 

 

Starvation of the Vulnerable Linked To Diet of the Affluent

 

Of planet Earth’s nearly 7 billion humans, roughly 1 billion people are malnourished and 6 million children starve to death annually as a result of the meat and dairy based diet of the affluent.

Farming individuals is notoriously wasteful when compared to growing plants to feed humans directly.  “Livestock” animals, individuals raised for meat and dairy, take drastically more food from the global food supply than they provide.

Crops necessary to feed individuals raised for human food are vastly more crops than it would take to feed humans directly.  It takes thirteen pounds of grain to yield just one pound of beef.  Crops such as soy and lentils produce, pound for pound, as much protein as beef, and sometimes more.

Feeding half the world’s edible grain crop to farmed individuals is a grossly inefficient use of protein and a waste of natural resources.  It requires far more land, water and energy than cultivating plant foods for direct human consumption.

One acre of land can yield between twelve and twenty times more plant food than animal-based foods.  This is also true of water usages.  Pollution of water, air and land, human mortality and morbidity, as well as starvation of the world’s most vulnerable people also result from the affluent’s meat and dairy based diet.

 

 

Animal Sacrifice in the Himalayas

In Bangladesh, Nepal, and other parts of the Himalaya region, religious animal sacrifices take place on a regular basis.  This is the part of the world that not too long ago would burn girls, as young as ten years old, in oil soaked wedding dresses, as ‘brides’ if the man they had been arranged to marry died in Nepal.

 “I’ve seen these kinds of horrors before, but the torture that I have witnessed during Eid al-Adha scarred me for the rest of my life.”  Animal Rescue Mission (ARM)  undercover investigator.

 The Eid al-Adha animal sacrifice festival is horrendous.  Millions of cows, goats, sheep, and even camels travel in a mass caravan by boats, trucks, and ‘death trains’. They are crammed into unhygienic and unsafe transport units.  They suffer in the unforgiving sun, often succumbing to severe dehydration and exhaustion.  Restrained by tight ropes. Swarmed by zealous mobs. Executed with machetes. 

Not even pregnant and newborn animals are safe during Eid al-Adha.  Their final destination is Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, and the epicenter of an animal sacrifice that will leave blood flooding the streets.  Despite the current restrictions of the pandemic, nothing is standing in the way of slaughtering these animals.  The festival will proceed.