OP-ED: The coronavirus pandemic: A wake-up call

By RICHARD SCHWARTZ

The present coronavirus pandemic should be a wake-up call for the urgency of eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, the consumption of animals.

Food and health experts agree that the pandemic began due to the consumption of a wild animal at one of China’s many live animal markets, which sell animals from over 100 different species who had been raised in dirty, cramped, stressed, disease prone conditions.

These repulsive places are known as “wet markets” because animals are often killed in the midst of the mess and filth. These slaughtered animals’ blood and entrails wash and over and mix with the people, the live animals and dirt, creating ideal conditions that produce and spread novel viruses that can span the species barrier.

The pandemic has caused widespread illnesses, the loss of thousands of lives, millions of jobs, and trillions of dollars; it is a global threat to businesses and industries.

Is eating animals worth all of this devastation?

It is ironic that a disease resulting from animals being kept in closed, confined spaces is causing hundreds of millions of people to be confined in their homes, with their freedom of movement sharply curtailed.

To China’s credit, upon recognizing the great devastation caused by their live animal market to their own econmomy, they have ordered the closure of every such market in the country. Will other countries follow their example?

After all, modern factory farms and slaughterhouses also pose similar dangers, as millions of animals are raised in crowded, filthy, disease-promoting conditions and then slaughtered in mass production methods with blood, feces, and other pollutants mingling. Conditions are so bad that the industry has the highest industrial injury rate and turnover of workers.

Additional reasons for eliminating or sharply reducing animal consumption include:

• Many previous major disease outbreaks – including swine flu, mad cow disease, bird flu, SARS, and MERS – were due to human consumption of animals.
• Many studies published in peer-reviewed articles in respected medical journals have shown strong links between the consumption of meat and other animal products with incidents of heart disease, several types of cancer, strokes, and other life-threatening diseases.
• Several studies show that well-balanced animal-free diets and other positive lifestyle changes not only can reduce risks of such diseases, but in some cases can reverse them.
• Because factory farmed animals live in unnatural, cramped and unsanitary conditions, farmers routinely use antibiotics in animal feed in efforts to reduce disease outbreaks. This has resulted in an antibiotic resistance-related health crisis for people, as antibiotics are becoming less effective in responding to human diseases.
• Animal-based diets require as much as 20 times as much land, 13 times as much water and 10 times as much energy per person than vegan diets. While an estimated nine million of the world’s people die annually of hunger and its effects and over ten percent are chronically malnourished, 70 percent of the grain produced in the United States is fed to animals destined for slaughter.

While climate experts are increasingly warning that without changes, there may be no way to avert a climate catastrophe (and there seem to be almost daily reports of severe, sometimes record-breaking heat waves, droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, and other climate events), the livestock sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), largely due to huge amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, emitted from cows and other farmed animals.

A 2006 report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” stated that the livestock industry emits more GHGs, in CO2 equivalents than all the cars, planes, ships, and other means of transportation worldwide combined.

“Livestock and Climate Change,” a 2009 cover story in WorldWatch magazine by two World Bank environmentalists, concluded that the livestock sector is responsible for at least 51 percent of all human-induced GHGs.

Climate change is especially threatening to Israel as a rising Mediterranean Sea could inundate the coastal plane where much of Israel’s population and infrastructure are located; the hotter and dryer Middle East that climate experts are projecting make instability, terrorism, and war more likely, according to military experts.

These experts also warn that climate change will cause tens of millions of desperate refugees worldwide to flee from severe climate events, resulting in a far much more unstable and violent world.

We failed to heed the warnings of medical experts and were unprepared for the present coronavirus pandemic. Will we now fail to heed the warnings of climate experts, and face another future catastrophe?

To leave a decent, habitable world for future generations, it is essential that there be a major societal shift to plant-based diets. As Jerry Brown, former governor of California, expressed it, “Humanity is on a collision course with nature.” There is no Planet B.

Diets free of meat and other animal products have the added advantage of being most consistent with basic Jewish teachings on preserving human health, treating animals with compassion, protecting the environment, conserving natural resources, and helping hungry people. It also makes it more likely that one is being consistent with the laws of kashrut.

Hence, shifting to a vegan diet is the best thing we can do for our health and the health of our imperiled planet, for animals, for reducing hunger, for the efficient use of water energy and other natural resources and for living most consistently with Jewish values and laws. It is a win-win-win- win-win situation.

(Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., is an emeritus professor at the College of Staten Island and the author of a number of books on vegetarianis, veganism and Jewish values.)