Eating meat

The argument

Coronavirus is a type of disease that can occur in both animals and humans, as SARS did, and that dual host range is what makes the origin question a question about contact between the two. A disease confined to animals reaches people only where people and animals are brought close enough together for it to cross, so the conditions that create such proximity are part of the causal account rather than incidental to it. COVID-19 most likely began in bats or pangolins. A study undertaken by virologists found that COVID-19 is 96% similar to a variation of coronavirus found in bats, which is the evidence placing the origin in an animal population rather than a human one. Reports have traced the earliest occurrence of the disease to an animal market in Wuhan, China, where many types of animals including birds, snakes and rabbits are traded illegally. It is believed that from here the disease jumped from animals to humans, perhaps being transmitted from bat to pangolin first. A market is precisely the setting such a jump requires: species that would not otherwise meet are held together, and people handle them at close quarters. The reason those animals are gathered there at all is demand for them as food — pangolins are sold because they are a delicacy. Without reasons to be in close proximity to animals, without people eating meat, proponents of this view argue that coronavirus would not have spread, because the point of contact where it crossed into humans would not have existed. The conclusion is that the pandemic belongs on an account already being kept. Eating meat is incredibly bad for the environment, and on this argument it has now also caused a global pandemic.

Premises

Counter-arguments

While COVID-19 has been traced back to a Wuhan animal market, it is not confirmed that this is how the disease spread from animals to humans.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Genetic similarity to a bat coronavirus establishes where the virus came from, not how it reached people, and 96% similarity denotes a related lineage rather than a direct ancestor — the intervening route is precisely what is unresolved. [Rejecting P2] The market is a place where early cases clustered, which is not the same as the point of transmission, as the counter says. The premise then generalises from trade in wild animals to eating meat as such, when farmed livestock is a different practice, and the position it is filed under concerns destruction of the environment — habitat loss and land conversion — a distinct claim from consumption that is never argued.