I used to think that there were three good reasons to not eat animals and animal products, but it turns out there are four.

The first three are straightforward. Eating animals is bad for your health, which has been shown many times in laboratory and population studies. It’s no surprise that the places in the world with the longest-lived people – so-called “Blue Zones” such as Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California – are composed of people eating primarily a whole-food, plant-based diet. You can look it up.

The second reason not to eat animal products may be as close as the furry friend in your home. We do everything to keep our pets happy and healthy but give no thought to the suffering that goes into the bacon on our breakfast plates. Ninety-nine percent of the meat and eggs and more than 80% of milk products in this country come from inhumane, often brutal factory farms.

The third reason is one you may have heard about because animal agriculture contributes significantly to climate change. It also causes species extinctions, land, air, and water pollution, overfishing, and deforestation in fragile ecosystems like the Amazon. The fact is that it takes five to 10 times more natural resources to provide nutrition from animal products as plants, including the fresh water that’s disappearing as the world’s climate warms.

I have always thought these good reasons to avoid eating animals were inherently sturdy and balanced like a three-legged stool. Come to a plant-based diet for one and discover the powerful arguments for the other two.

Now, a fourth reason has become equally compelling in the age of COVID-19.

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And it’s not just COVID. In less than 20 years, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), H1N1 swine flu, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) are new viruses that jumped from the animals we eat to humans, and then between humans, with cases multiplying disastrously in the world’s mobile population. These diseases have devastating health and economic consequences. Some may spread so quickly that there’s nothing most nations can do other than “social distance” and track cases to slow their spread.

Yet, we’ve been lucky. SARS emerged in the early years of this century, likely transmitted from civets sold in local markets of China’s Yunnan province. Its fatality rate was about 10%, and many of those who recovered had such badly compromised lungs that they could never again function normally. However, SARS was not especially contagious and the number of cases worldwide remained below 10,000, with China accounting for 7,000. The 27 cases in the United States caused no deaths, but Canada had 251, and 43 died.

Now, imagine an influenza as easily transmitted as COVID-19 but with a death rate like SARS’s 10%. Actually, imagine something much worse. Since 2003, there has been an influenza virus spreading and evolving in African and Asian poultry flocks. So far, it’s only been transmitted bird to bird and bird to human, not human to human. But that may be just a mutation or two away. Of the 630 people who have caught the virus, almost 60% have died.

If the mutations that could make this avian influenza transmittable between humans were to render it, like COVID-19, highly contagious and difficult to track, we would be facing a fast-moving plague of biblical proportions. Contemplate that for a moment.

The World Health Organization is watching this avian influenza carefully, and several countries have vaccines ready to test should the need arise, but mutations may render them useless. And with animal agriculture as well as bush meat and wet markets for wild animals in so many nations, the next viral outbreak could come from just about anywhere.

For example, Indonesia has both animal agriculture and a large bush-meat market on the island of Sulawesi that the nation’s top COVID-19 expert recently called “a cafeteria for animal pathogens.” A novel virulent virus infecting people there could easily start the next pandemic.

Back in September 2007, the American Public Health Association was so concerned about pandemics resulting from influenza viruses jumping species that it editorialized in its Journal against eating meat. These trans-species viruses, it said, “have caused and will cause considerable human fear, suffering, and death … ” The editorial then prodded, “It is curious, therefore, that changing the way humans treat animals — most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten — is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure.”

And there’s the fourth good reason for none of us to eat animals. As any public health doctor will tell you, an ounce of that “significant preventative measure” is worth a good pound of pandemic cure.

Lenny Reich of Belgrade is a professor emeritus in the Department of Science, Technology & Society at Colby College.


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