Asia’s Leading Animal Charities Urge For Complete Ban On ‘Wet Markets’
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, wet markets - often full of live and butchered animals - have come under increased scrutiny for their role in spreading diseases.
Credit: Amy Jones/Moving Animals
A coalition of twenty-two of Asia’s leading animal charities have called for an immediate ban on all wet markets across Asia in a bid to prevent the potential outbreak of more infectious diseases.
In light of the COVID-19 epidemic reportedly starting from a wet market in Wuhan, China, so-called ‘wet markets’ have come under increased scrutiny for their role in spreading diseases.
Street markets across Asia are a common way to buy fresh food including fruits, grains and vegetables. However, markets that sell animals - both live and already-butchered - are commonly referred to as wet markets, and this practice is now facing calls to be outlawed.
Slaughtering wildlife and farm animals in street markets creates a host of problems from “grossly unhygienic conditions” to extreme animal cruelty. According to the Asia for Animals coalition, the wet markets also become the “perfect environment for disease to spread”, with the COVID-19 just the latest infectious disease to originate from there.
“The risk to human health and livelihoods posed by wildlife trade and consumption has become crystal clear to everyone since the spread of COVID-19 began”, says Dr. Teresa Telecky, Vice President of Wildlife at Humane Society International. “The disease started in a wildlife market in China, as did the coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) eight years ago.”
Calling for a ban on the wildlife trade and the permanent closure of so-called wet markets, Dr. Telecky added,
“these markets are hotbeds for the spread of viruses to humans from animals who are often injured, sick and dying due to concentrated farming environments, brutal methods of their capture, long-distance transport, rough loading and unloading, and lack of appropriate care.”
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