United Poultry Concerns - [link removed]
29 April 2020

NATIONAL REVIEW:
China's Wet Markets, America's Factory Farming

By MATTHEW SCULLY
April 9, 2020 10:20 AM

They're more alike than not in their violations of moral common sense.


Although no government is better than China's at making troublesome people
disappear, a strange leniency has been accorded vendors at the country's
live-animal meat markets, who by most accounts gave us the pandemic and yet,
reports the Daily Mail, have lately been allowed to set up shop again. China's
coronavirus lockdown is over, authorities have encouraged celebrations of
"victory," and citizens may once again go about their food shopping amid the
cries and mayhem of animal slaughter. Ahh, back to normal life!

In these parts, we're told, you're not really celebrating unless there's bat,
pangolin, cat, or dog meat on the table - the latter, notes the Daily Mail, "a
traditional 'warming' winter dish." Reporter George Knowles, writing late last
month, provides one of the milder accounts of scenes that will quickly exhaust
anyone's supply of culturally sensitive euphemisms, describing one of the
markets - also known as "wet markets," where both live and dead animals are on
offer - in China's southwestern city of Guilin: "Terrified dogs and cats crammed
into rusty cages. Bats and scorpions offered for sale as traditional medicine.
Rabbits and ducks slaughtered and skinned side by side on a stone floor covered
with blood, filth, and animal remains."

If you're up for a few further details, we have travel writer Paula Froelich, in
a recent New York Post column, recalling how in the Asian live-animal markets
she has visited the doomed creatures "stare back at you." When their turn comes,
she writes,

the animals that have not yet been dispatched by the butcher's knife make
desperate bids to escape by climbing on top of each other and flopping or
jumping out of their containers (to no avail). At least in the wet areas
[where marine creatures are sold], the animals don't make a sound. The screams
from mammals and fowl are unbearable and heartbreaking.

The People's Republic has supposedly banned the exotic-meat trade, and one major
city, Shenzhen, has proscribed dog and cat meat as well. In reality, observes a
second Daily Mail correspondent, anonymously reporting from the city of
Dongguan, "the markets have gone back to operating in exactly the same way as
they did before coronavirus." Nothing has changed, except in one feature: "The
only difference is that security guards try to stop anyone taking pictures,
which would never have happened before."

Lest we hope too much for some post-pandemic stirring of conscience, consider
the Chinese government's idea of a palliative for those suffering from the
coronavirus. As the crisis spread, apparently some fast-thinking experts in
"traditional medicine" at China's National Health Commission turned to an
ancient remedy known as Tan Re Qing, adding it to their official list of
recommended treatments. The potion consists chiefly of bile extracted from
bears. The more fortunate of these bears are shot in the wild for use of their
gallbladders. The others, across China and Southeast Asia, are captured and
"farmed" by the thousands, in a process that involves their interminable,
year-after-year confinement in fit-to-size cages, interrupted only by the
agonies of having the bile drained. Do an image search on "bear bile farming"
sometime when you're ready to be reminded of what hellish animal torments only
human stupidity, arrogance, and selfishness could devise.

If one abomination could yield an antidote for the consequences of another, Tan
Re Qing would surely be just the thing to treat a virus loosed in the pathogenic
filth and blood-spilling of Wuhan's live market. There's actually a synthetic
alternative to the bile acids, but Tradition can be everything in these matters,
and devotees insist that the substance must come from a bear, even as real
medical science rates the whole concoction at somewhere between needless and
worthless. President Xi Jinping has promoted such traditional medicines as a
"treasure of Chinese civilization." In this case, the keys to the treasure open
small, squalid cages in dark rooms, where the suffering of innocent creatures
goes completely disregarded. And perhaps right there, in the willfulness and
hardness of heart of all such practices, is the source of the trouble that
started in China.

Already, in the Western media, chronologies of the pandemic have taken to
passing over details of the live-animal markets, which have caused viral
outbreaks before and would all warrant proper judgment in any case. News
coverage picks up the story with the Chinese government's cover-up of early
coronavirus cases and its silencing of the heroic Wuhan doctors and nurses who
tried to warn us. To brush past the live markets in fear of seeming
"xenophobic," "racist," or unduly judgmental of other people and other ways is,
however, to lose sight of perhaps the most crucial fact of all. We don't know
the endpoint of this catastrophe, but we are pretty certain that its precise
point of origin was what Dr. Anthony Fauci politely calls "that unusual
human-animal interface" of the live markets, which he says should all be shut
down immediately - presumably including the markets quietly tolerated in our own
country. In other words, the plague began with savage cruelty to animals.

Discussion of the live-animal markets is another of those points where moral
common sense encounters the slavishly politically correct, though it's not as if
we're dealing here with Asia's most sensitive types anyway. No Western critic
need worry about hurting the feelings or reputations of people who maximize the
pain and stress of dogs in the belief that this freshens the flavor of the meat,
and who then kill them at the market as the other dogs watch. Customers of such
people aren't likely to feel the sting of our disapproval either.

About the many customers and suppliers in Asia, and especially in China, of
exotic fare, endless ancient remedies, and carvings and trinkets made of ivory,
the best that can be said is that these men and women are no more representative
of their nations than are the riffraff running the meat markets. Their demands
and appetites have caused a merciless pillaging of wildlife across the earth -
everything that moves a "living resource," no creature rare or stealthy enough
to escape their gluttony or vanity. Of late even donkeys, such peaceable and
unoffending creatures, have been rounded up by the millions in Asia, Africa, the
Middle East, and South America for shipment and slaughter, all to satisfy demand
for yet another of China's traditional-medicine manias.

Easy to blame for all of this is the government of China. Authorities took
forever, for example, to enforce prohibitions on ivory carving, despite an
unquestioned competence in carrying out swift crackdowns. And in general, at
every level, the government tends to tolerate a culture of cruelty, or else to
actively promote it at the prodding of lucrative industries, both legal and
illicit. But the problem runs deeper than that, even as many younger Chinese, to
their enormous credit, have tried to organize against the ivory trade, the wet
markets, and other depravities in their midst.

In the treatment of animals and in safeguarding human health, there are
elementary standards to which all must answer. The challenge to clear thinking,
as Melissa Chen writes in Spectator USA,

is to avoid falling into the trap of cultural relativism. It's perfectly
appropriate to criticize China's rampant consumption of exotic animals, lack
of hygiene standards and otherwise risky behavior that puts people at risk for
zoonotic infections. Until these entrenched behaviors based on cultural or
magical beliefs are divorced from Chinese culture, wet wildlife markets will
linger as time-bombs ready to set off the next pandemic.

Acknowledging that Western societies have every moral reason to condemn the
barbarism and recklessness of the live-animal markets only invites, however, a
tougher question: Do we have the moral standing? And if any of us are guilty of
blind cultural prejudice or of a smug sense of superiority toward Chinese
practices, a moment's serious thought will quickly set us straight.

When the Daily Mail describes how Chinese guards at the live-animal market now
"try to stop anyone from taking pictures," who does that remind us of? How about
our own livestock companies, whose entire mode of operation these days is
systematic concealment by efforts to criminalize the taking of pictures in or
around their factory farms and slaughterhouses? The foulest live-animal-market
slayer in China, Vietnam, Laos, or elsewhere would be entitled to ask what our
big corporations are afraid the public might see in photographic evidence, or
what's really the difference between his trade and theirs except walls,
machinery, and public-relations departments.

If you watch online videos of the wet markets, likewise, it's striking how the
meat shoppers just go on browsing, haggling, chatting, and even laughing, some
with their children along. Were it not for the horrors and whimpers in the
background, the scene could be a pleasant morning at anyone's local farmer's
market. As the camera follows them from counter to counter, you keep thinking
What's wrong with these people? - except that it's not so easy, rationally, to
find comparisons that work in our favor.

No, we in the Western world don't get involved while grim-faced primitives
execute and skin animals for meat. We have companies with people of similar
temperament to handle everything for us. And there's none of that "staring back"
that the Post's Paula Froelich describes, because, in general, we keep the
sadness and desperation of those creatures as deeply suppressed from conscious
thought as possible. An etiquette of denial pushes the subject away, leaving it
all for others to bear. Addressing a shareholders' meeting of Tyson Foods in
2006, one worker from a slaughterhouse in Sioux City, Iowa, unburdened himself:
"The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. Pigs
down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes
later I had to kill them - beat them to death with a pipe. I can't care."

Following the only consistent rule in both live-animal markets and industrial
livestock agriculture - that the most basic animal needs are always to be
subordinated to the most trivial human desires - this process yields the meats
that people crave so much, old favorites like bacon, veal, steak, and lamb that
customers must have, no matter how these are obtained. When the pleasures of
food become an inordinate desire, forcing demands without need or limit and
regardless of the moral consequences, there's a word for that, and the fault is
always easier to see in foreigners with more free-roaming tastes in flesh. But
listen carefully to how these foods or other accustomed fare are spoken of in
our culture, and the mindset of certain Asians - those ravenous, inflexible
folks who will let nothing hinder their next serving of pangolin scales or
winter dish of dog - no longer seems a world away.

We in the West don't eat pangolins, turtles, civets, peacocks, monkeys, horses,
foxes, and wolf cubs - that's all a plus. But for the animals we do eat, we have
sprawling, toxic, industrial "mass-confinement" farms that look like
concentration camps. National "herds" and "flocks" that all would expire in
their misery but for a massive use of antibiotics, among other techniques, to
maintain their existence amid squalor and disease - an infectious "time bomb"
closer to home as bacterial and viral pathogens gain in resistance. And a whole
array of other standard practices like the "intensive confinement" of pigs, in
gestation cages that look borrowed from Asia's bear-bile farms; the bulldozing
of lame "downer cows"; and "maceration" of unwanted chicks, billions routinely
tossed into grinders. All of which leave us very badly compromised as any model
in the decent treatment of animals.

Such influence as we have, in fact, is usually nothing to be proud of. It made
for a perfect partnership when, for instance, one of the most disreputable of
all our factory-farming companies, Smithfield Foods, was acquired in 2013 by a
Chinese firm, in keeping with some state-run, five-year plan of the People's
Republic to refine agricultural techniques and drive up meat production. Now,
thanks to American innovation, Smithfield-style, the Chinese can be just as
rotten to farm animals as we are - and just as sickly from buying into the worst
elements of the Western diet.

In China and Southeast Asia, they have still not received our divine revelation
in the West that human beings shall not eat or inflict extreme abuse on dogs but
that all atrocities to pigs are as nothing. They're moving in our culinary
direction, however, and more than half the world's factory-farmed pigs are now
in China and neighboring countries. In the swine-fever contagion spreading
across that region right now - addressed as usual by mass cullings: gassing tens
of millions of pigs or burying them alive - our industrial animal-agriculture
system is leaving its mark, while providing yet further evidence that factory
farms are all pandemic risks themselves.

How many diseases, cullings, burial pits, and bans on photographing these places
even at their wretched best will we need before realizing that the entire system
is profoundly in error, at times even wicked, and that nothing good can ever
come of it? Perhaps the live-animal markets of China, with all the danger and
ruin they have spread, will help us to see those awful scenes as what they are,
just variants of unnatural, unnecessary, and unworthy practices that every
society and culture would be better off without.

Plagues, as we're all discovering, have a way of prompting us to take stock of
our lives and to remember what really matters. If, while we're at it, we begin
to feel in this time of confinement and fear a little more regard for the lives
of animals, a little more compassion, that would be at least one good sign for a
post-pandemic world.


Matthew Scully MATTHEW SCULLY is the author of DOMINION: The Power of Man, the
Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. A former literary editor of
National Review and senior speechwriter to President George W. Bush, he lives in
Paradise Valley, Ariz.
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NATIONAL REVIEW: China's Wet Markets, America's Factory Farming:
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--
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don't just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
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