An Invitation To Zoonotic Disaster: Meat and Dairy by Sharon L. Wallenberg

Zoonotic disease, including Covid 19, is directly linked to human - animal interactions initially then transmitted directly among humans.

Meat and dairy production involves billions of high-risk interactions between humans and animals.  Innocent, incarcerated animals in the food system are relentlessly stressed, confined, forced to share space with dead or diseased animals, share bodily fluids and airborne pathogens, expel waste on each other, all while being fed a steady supply of antibiotics.  The physiological stress that animals endure weakens their immune systems making them much more likely to become vectors of disease.  The system invites zoonotic disaster.

Factory farms are epicenters of disease for humans as well as the billions of unfortunate animals involuntarily incarcerated there.  Thousands of genetically similar animals are packed together in unsanitary, overcrowded spaces. They are vulnerable to disease and stress placed on their immune systems by these horrific conditions.  Factory farms are ideal environments for viruses and other pathogens to circulate, mutate and ‘spill over’ to human exploiters.  United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) maintains that farmed animals are the weakest link in our global health.

An estimated 99% of the ten billion land animals murdered for food every year in the US alone are imprisoned in factory farms, and murdered with impunity. Innocent animals in factory farms or live markets are severely stressed, cannot engage in natural behaviors, experience frustration, and maladaptive behaviors such as injuring or murdering one another out of survival instinct.  Pigs can drop dead from the stress of being confined.  All these conditions make animals (amplifier hosts) more susceptible to pathogens, which then get passed on to their human abusers (bridge population), and the human population in general through zoonotic pandemics.