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Comment by balola | Hacker News Reader

Good luck telling the rich and powerful they shouldn't eat this what they believed is the most tonic and upscale meat of late.

Remember that girl who paid 6.5 million dollars to get into Stanford last year? Her dad's listed company sells billions of dollars of TCM every year that claims to cure thrombus because the ingredients used (earthworm, scorpion and leech) are adept at digging things. Yes TCMs don't need to go through any FDA-like process or trial to prove anything, coz it's national treasure.

Pangolin meat and scales are prized in TCM coz you know, it dig rocks.

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TCM = traditional chinese medicine I presume.

regards, your friendly neighbourhood abbreviation hater.

And Wikipedia lists Pangolins as the most trafficked animal in the world (edit: as does the BBC article).

There’s only a limited number of wealthy people even in China, so making it a 10x difficult and expensive it will still reduce, you know by China and Vietnam actually making an effort to reduce the trade in wildlife, it could help regardless.

The worst ones are the unsanitary wet markets in the middle of dense urban areas, getting rid of those is the first step.

Meanwhile Xi Jinping is still promoting Chinese medicine in conjunction with standard medicine, even during the pandemic.

The wildlife “ban” that China enacted conveniently doesn’t include medicine, only for food consumption. There’s little chance the animals being brought into the country legally won’t have their meat sold on the blackmarket, just so they can get some scales or individual organs.

> There’s only a limited number of wealthy people even in China

You're thinking China from 50 years ago. There are at least 4.4 million millionaires in China! More than in the US

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/21/china-overt...

EDIT: sorry, I've misread the title, looking at the actual report https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... it seems that US still has (well, had in 2019) way more millionaires - 18 million. It's only in top 10% wealthiest people that China overtook US

Still, 4 million people eating pangolins would provide enough opportunities for interesting zoonotic jumps

0.003% of Chinese citizens being millionaires doesn’t discredit my comment.

If only a subset of them were the ones buying the millions of trafficked Pangolins and civets and whatever else carries CoV, then that’d be great progress as a starting point.

Then for the wealthy you can make it a big social stigma to purchase them, especially after it brought the worlds economy to a halt... instead of doing the complete opposite where authorities are promoting it. Chinese authorities are well versed in influencing social stigmas and public shaming, which is a big deal in a country where ‘saving face’ often outranks reality.

After that you could focus on culling the wild populations that often get released in atypical habitats as a side-effect of poaching http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161006-pangolins-are-the-wo...

I read they're prized for curing male impotence, because you know... They have hard scales.

A lot of things in TCM do that, like tiger/bull cock or antler, even garlic chives, beef, sheep or kidney.

IIRC the term for this is "sympathetic magic"

This is kind of an off-the-wall idea, but... what about creating artificial meat substitutes for these prized exotic animals?

Couldn't Beyond Meat create a pretty close facsimile to pangolin or bat or snake or whatever? Obviously this wouldn't eliminate 100% of demand. Particularly among those eating the animals for their magical properties, instead of their taste. But even if artificial versions of exotic meats could cut consumption by 20-30%, the corresponding risk of zoonotic virus transmission should fall linearly along with that.

It's valueded because it's wild and natural, they don't care about the costs, many of the eaters show off this dish on social media coz they are rich and powerful, and won't be punished for eating endangered animals.

And it's not that exotic meats are all delicious so people prize them, what flavor do shark fins/cubilose have? It's the supposed power they got.

This wouldn't work. It's like diamonds, the value is in the rarity.

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