Carnivores, Coronavirus And The End Of The World
A Meat and Dairy Industries Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Alex Lockwood, PlantBasedNews.org
March 2020

Now is the right moment to ask the mainstream media to lead every headline with the fact that 75 percent of newly emerging human diseases come not as if by magic from 'animal sources', but from our acts of killing, eating, and exploitation of those animals. This is where COVID-19 has come from.

The history of pandemics, from the Antonine Plague to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) event, ranked by their impact on human life. (Source: Visual Capitalist)

Maybe it will be in several months, or a year. Maybe when the novel coronavirus COVID-19 has killed most of the people it will kill - maybe then. Or it will come as a single moment: we will remember a before, and talk of an after.

Maybe it will come in increments, resisted by anger and disbelief but overcome with persistence and grief. Or, aware of our species fallibility, our unwillingness to upset the status quo, our ability to talk ourselves out of inconvenient truths, maybe the moment will not come at all.

And if it doesn’t, then goodbye.

The moment is now, maybe. As you are reading these next two lines: an instant of worldwide acceptance of what is staring us in the face.

First: the coronavirus is an emergency not solely of health but of injustice. And second: the injustice is not only that we are forced to ‘lose loved ones before their time’ (as the UK prime minister crassly put it) but that foremost, this emergency of injustice has been caused by the exploitation of animals.

Without this ongoing and unnecessary violence, we would not be experiencing this awful global pandemic at all.

Has that moment arrived? Those who work for animal justice hope so: for Carl Safina COVID-19 is a 'wake up call' to which we've already hit snooze too many times.

For Farm Sanctuary’s Gene Baur, the coronavirus is a karmic reminder of the interconnectedness of humans and animals. Activists in Berlin made this point earlier this week, and activists in London from Pause The System took the message to Parliament and Boris Johnson.

Now is the right moment to ask the mainstream media to lead every headline with the fact that 75 percent of newly emerging human diseases come not as if by magic from 'animal sources', but from our acts of killing, eating, and exploitation of those animals. This is where COVID-19 has come from.

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Alex Lockwood is a writer and senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland. He is the author of The Pig in Thin Air (Lantern Books), a vegan memoir about the relationship between climate change and the food we eat.

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