Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

We're in the middle of a global pandemic quite possibly caused by Chinese people consuming animals that shouldn't be consumed. "Open minded" is not the right description for this behavior.

View on HN

Can I just say, people have been eating bats for millenia, and there's never been a global pandemic arising from bat eating in recorded history. In fact, in recent history, there's never been a definite zoonotic global pandemic even 1/10th as serious as covid. Swine flu and Bird Flu weren't close in severity, and came from eating common farmed animals.

Perhaps eating certain animals should be curtailed (I'm no expert) as long as it doesn't result in low protein intake. But, the anti-China sentiment is xenophobic.

The 2014/2015 Ebola crisis in West Africa has also been definitively traced to people eating bats. There's biological reasons why bats are reservoirs of viruses that are not harmful to themselves, but to many other mammals.

But not a global pandemic, and I'm guessing less serious than swine flu and bird flu, which we still eat.

> There's biological reasons why bats are reservoirs of viruses

Interesting. Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1539106/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200210144854.h...

https://www.the-scientist.com/notebook/why-bats-make-such-go...

See references linked here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome

You can't just take every species that hasn't caused a global pandemic in the past and declare them all equally safe. There are differing levels of risk in different species, and not only that but in different farming and food preparation practices, and in captive vs. wild populations.

The common cold and flu come from domesticated animals every year.

Pretty much all serious pandemics started in some other species of mammals, and then transferred to humans. Examples: SARS, bird flu, ebola, hiv, spanish flu.

(I agree that blaming Chinese culture for the problem is xenophobic nonsense though.)

Unfortunately there is no universal golden rule on what "should" be eaten or not. Especially when you are hungry and there isn't many choices. If you didn't die or get sick, you might choose to continue eating a "weird food" because they taste good, even when you have other choices.

It's bizarre to Americans that _some_ Chinese are eating bats[1] and snakes[2]. It's bizarre to Chinese that _some_ Americans are eating alligators[3][4], bears and frogs.

It is human nature to explore and try new things including animals for food. If one has known better, maybe it's better to educate others what are good/bad food sources, with proofs.

Mutual discrimination based on sensational news and locally-biased "common sense" are not making the world a better place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_soup [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_meat [4] https://youtu.be/V-mJ0UWfxno?t=266

There are different levels of risk. It's not all the same. I would be just fine with banning consumption of alligators, bears, or frogs if the risk is assessed to be as high as for bats.

Swine flu came from pigs, bird flu from birds; both still eaten in backward parts of the west.

>animals that shouldn't be consumed

Implying there are 'correct' animals to consume

There are definitely incorrect animals to consume. I have no problem stating that it is wrong to consume animals from wild populations of species that harbor viruses potentially capable of infecting humans and causing a global pandemic. Also endangered species. If that's controversial, well, it shouldn't be.

This strikes me as a first-world privileged thing, similar to how Europe built its industrial revolution on coal but now tries to prevent others from doing the same thing. Even in the US we eat domesticated livestock (cattle), cultivated but not domesticated livestock (bison), and entirely wild animals (deer). Any of these could vector a novel illness to humans.

I'd be fine with banning consumption of wild deer, for example.

About 350,000 deer are culled in the UK each year, the population is actively managed in many places of the country for various reasons [1]. Because of this, venison is not uncommon in our supermarkets. Should we just destroy the corpses instead?

[1] https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/advice-education/why-manage...

Yes, if the risk of transmitting pandemic causing viruses to humans is as high as for bats.

Not all animal species carry the same risk. This isn't about privilege - or at least not anymore. Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved after food shortages and famines caused by e.g. the four pests and such. This is cultural. as are the unsanitary conditions at wet markets, and completely unscientific "traditional medicine" and the common notion that live beings taste better if tortured before death.

Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.

> Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved

That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.

If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".

"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB

> infecting humans and causing a global pandemic

Kinda like the swine flu?

That's why we should only consume pigs raised in captivity with no exposure to wild populations. If that's where you get your bats or pangolins from, and you actually have enforcement and verification of that, then no problem. (Except that pangolins are endangered of course.)

Some meats are associated with disease (including those eaten in western countries, like trichinosis from pork) and others are not.

Pretty much any animal except pangolins and bats that does not carry COVID & friends...

I’m curious to know if you think the animals the west consume which cause disease are satisfactory.

Not if they are from wild populations, or raised in a way that they could be exposed to viruses from wild populations, or if they are endangered species.

I’m not sure being wild is a good indicator. I would think the opposite might be true wherein industrial farming and close quarters would cause more disease, just like how we talk about population density and covid-19. If you aren’t exposed to others, disease can’t spread. For instance, H1N1 didn’t start in the wild. And it didn’t start with an exotic animal. But it was a global pandemic.

The only position you can safely hold is to not eat meat. A weaker position could be around the sanitation and care of stock and its preparation. But what you eat doesn’t matter, be it pig or dog or squirrel or bat.

You're right, I'm sure farming practices could be improved to help prevent pandemics. But it is false to say that all animals carry the same level of risk, and forgoing meat entirely is far from the only option to reduce risk.

How do you quantify the risk, and where is the line drawn?

I'd say that capturing wild animals, then keeping them in cramped unsanitary conditions, along with other species, is the worst possible option for disease. Industrial farming only does one of those three.

That's a bit like the fallacy of relative privation: Because what the west does isn't as bad, they aren't culpable. Again, there was a global pandemic caused by pig farming just 11 short years ago, and everybody is still eating bacon.

Sure, but you need some threshold, otherwise you conclude you can never buy anything or see another person. "Buy no meat" is not fully safe either, so that's not the objective place to draw the line.

And I'm not trying to make an argument about "the west", it's just about specific animals and ways to get them.

So long as that threshold is based on science and not, “they eat weird stuff,” I’m okay with that.

If the threshold is: has caused pandemic, then swine is off the table, pun intended.

"has caused a global pandemic" would be a terrible threshold. The set of global pandemics is far too small to draw meaningful conclusions about risk. We have other data about viruses in animals that should be used.

You’re missing my point. If the argument is: "We're in the middle of a global pandemic quite possibly caused by Chinese people consuming animals that shouldn't be consumed,” then I would like to be clear that swine should also not be consumed, as they too have caused a global pandemic.

You're missing my point. That statement is not my argument about which specific animals should be consumed. It's my argument about the parent comment's statement, which I am simply responding to and did not even claim myself, that Chinese people eat a wider variety of animals than we do in the US, and the behavior of eating a wider variety of animals should be considered "open minded," implying (and again this is the parent comment's argument, not mine) that the practice of eating a narrower variety of animals should be considered "closed minded". My argument was that the timing of said statement from the parent comment is extremely unfortunate given the fact that the current global pandemic likely originated in animals consumed in China and generally not in the US, and the general idea of restricting animal consumption for health reasons should not be considered "closed minded". That's it.

Now, that statement assumes that some animals have higher risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans than others, and if you disagree with that then you'll disagree with the statement, but the statement itself was not an argument about that point. Subsequently we have further argued about that specific point. I don't believe that decisions about which animals to consume should be based on cultural factors as you assume, but rather I believe that it should be based on relevant science (not simply "has this specific animal caused a global pandemic in recent history"). I believe that science does not support the idea that all animals or animal procurement practices have identical risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans. Therefore I support the idea of restricting consumption of some animals, especially wild ones (including some currently consumed in the US), and reject the idea that this is simply "closed minded".

Unfortunately the inclusion of the single word "Chinese" in my original comment has blinded everyone to the argument I was making, despite the fact that it was simply a response to the parent comment. It would have been a better comment, and made the same point, without the word "Chinese" in it. Please strike that word from my original comment and read it again.

> there was a global pandemic caused by pig farming just 11 short years ago

This is disingenuous. That was nothing like this pandemic.

No it’s not. Nobody is saying that the 2009 swine flu pandemic was anything but that. It was a global pandemic.

Don’t say seat belts don’t matter for us because the other car was a hatchback instead of a pickup. They were both still car accidents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com