It's not so much what is being eaten but the way in which it is being caught, stored, sold, and eventually consumed that is worrying, unhygienic and needs to be stopped. And it's nothing to do with thinking West = best. This is an extract from a National Geographic article, it's completely disgusting and needs to end.
In markets, animals “are dying, they are thirsty, they are in rusty cages and totally dirty,” Li says. They may be missing limbs or have open wounds from their capture in the wild or injuries sustained during transport. “The traders don’t handle them gently—they smash the cages down to the floor when unloading and loading. The animals suffer a lot.”
The chaos of the trade enables the spread of zoonotic diseases—those that spread from animals to humans—says Christian Walzer, chief global veterinarian at the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society. Wild animals, he explains, can carry viruses that “in a normal world, would not come into contact with humans.” These carriers aren’t sick—they’re simply “silent reservoirs.” But as we encroach into animals’ habitats, we increase our exposure.
Seventy percent of zoonotic diseases come from wildlife, says Erin Sorrell, an assistant research professor in the department of microbiology and immunology at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. The diseases can be notoriously devastating: HIV, Ebola, and SARS are among those that have made the leap from wildlife to humans, spawning international outbreaks.
In wildlife markets in China and Southeast Asia, there may be 40 species—birds, mammals, reptiles—“stacked on top of each other,” Walzer says. The mixing of air and bodily secretions allows viruses to exchange, potentially creating new strains. Walzer sums it up as a “cauldron of contagion.”
Evidence points to bats as the source of the Wuhan coronavirus. It’s unclear which species then transmitted the disease to humans, but in an assessment of the Wuhan market, the coronavirus was detected in the live wild animal section.