Should We Domesticate Wild Animals to Prevent Disease Pandemics? An Interview with Peter Daszak
Dr. Peter Daszak, President, Eco-Health
On April 27, 2020, Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz, Eduardo Brondizio, and Dr. Peter Daszak published an article which argued that “Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a ‘perfect storm’ for the spillover of diseases from wildlife to people.”
Given that intensive farming requires significantly less land than traditional farming, and is widely viewed as an essential conservation solution, I interviewed Dr. Settele and Dr. Daszak by phone to understand what he meant. The following transcript includes edits by Dr. Settele.
Michael Shellenberger (MS): What do you mean by intensification?
The truth is that if we create a pathway for viruses to get from wildlife into people they’re going to exploit that pathway because that’s what viruses do and it’s doing it any possible way. The most significant problem is encroachment by people and livestock. As we move into areas where wildlife live and our population grows, and we increase wildlife pathways. It’s both wildlife to people and wildlife to livestock to people.
When we create a huge number of animals on farms it acts as a net to catch viruses. We saw it with avian flu. Nipah virus in Malaysia took a few years from the way the pigs were farmed. It was the specific way they had been intensified and how they got in, and segregated, which allowed the virus to play on the immunity of the young animals. It is an unfortunate byproduct of our industrial age is to create niches that allow pandemics to emerge, so let’s be aware and insure against it.
We need to both protect the industries that we rely on for global growth and prevent pandemics in a sustainable way. We need to do both. There can still be livestock production that gives cheap food and global trade and travel and in a way that prevents pandemics.
MS: So we do need to improve intensification, then?
It’s not about improving intensity but changing it. If the public demands that we need intensive production of food which underlies economic growth then we should get ready for it by insuring and changing how we intensify. There is a pathway where we can see an alternative and that’s what the editorial is trying to get to.
What are those pathways? We see a vision of a future where there are clearer skies and lower production of pathway and wildlife coming back where it wasn’t before and there are possibilities and we have to get back to work but maybe increase the time we spend telecommuting. We’re going to go back to globalized travel and trade and less impactful on the global environment and will create fewer pandemics and a healthier planet and when we do these things and intensify animal production. Let’s do surveillance and how pathogens are being picked up and we’re not even doing that. In the short term, it’s very productive to do but it’s that when big things happen that can undermine the global economy.
MS: What are the key biosecurity measures?
It starts with where you put the farms. You put them in areas rich in wildlife you run the risk of pathogens spreading. You create barriers between wildlife and livestock. You can’t have wild animals coming in and out. We see this all the time. Pig styes and barns with bats in them. In China, 25,000 pigs die of bat origin coronavirus, 2 - 3 years ago. Intensification would look like more testing of animals to see what pathogens they are picking up. Better biosecurity and better testing of people on farms. Not just known pathogens and every time they get sick. That costs money and has to be paid for and I understand that, but it becomes a worthwhile investment.
MS: Are heavily capitalized farms better at biosecurity?
In countries with a mixed farming system, you need different rules for different processes. Bigger companies will have an easier job of doing this. Maybe regulations can be brought and incentives for farmers to run a tighter ship in terms of pandemic risk that still allows them to make money. They just need to be looked at! The real point is that it hasn’t been looked at. Lots and lots of regulations around trade and production but when we think about new ones it’s not really looked at. What I’m saying personally based on the science is that if you’re going to do factory farming you really need to be careful to test for pathogens and make biosecurity a priority. But if you’re going to make a choice between different farming systems you need to think of the different risks. There are plenty of diseases driving by factory farming. Others are driven by a patchwork of animal-human contact from the sort of more general invasion of our life habitat. The real message is that let’s think about the pandemic risk for when we think of any encroachment.
MS: What would you say to those who say we just need to focus on south China and southeast Asia, since that’s where the coronaviruses are coming from?
There’s a specific issue in southeast Asia and China that is not straightforward but complicated. China is pushing for wildlife farming for food or medicine and there’s been a huge push for the last couple of decades. It’s part of their efforts at poverty alleviation and some of it is beneficial to local people. But it’s a disease risk and if done in the wrong way is a pathway to a health emergency. With covid-19, we don’t know the exact pathway but it’s quite possible and plausible that the wildlife farms were part of the story and we know it was circulating in a wildlife market in Wuhan and an incredible network of shipping live animals every day for food. Once a virus gets on the farm it can persist for a long period of time so it’s quite possible that this virus was circulating among farmed wildlife and livestock and got into markets that way.
MS: Is eating wild animals an intrinsically higher risk than eating domesticated animals, or is it just the way it’s produced?
Yes, it’s an inherently higher risk to farm wildlife because we don’t know what viruses are in them whereas in livestock we have been exposed to them for centuries and so there is an inherent risk, and doing it needs a real consideration for checking them.
We’ve done work with farmers in China. We’ve looked at a few species and have not found any risky viruses but there are thousands of these farms with multiple species mixing with livestock that are usually in barns or buildings that are easy to transmit and people are in them too and that inherent danger is being recognized
But the complexity is that they are part of the government’s poverty alleviation strategy and if it could be better managed it may be a better way to have a wildlife trade than taking them from the wild and having them regulated and policed and better place than from where we are now.
My personal view is that the call to ban the wildlife trade will be policed well enough to happen and I also don’t think that’s tenable either in China or around the world and around the world still rely on wild animals for nutrition and unrealistic to call for a ban. In China policing and banning wildlife would drive it underground and that’s a risk.
MS: So should we encourage the domestication of wildlife?
That’s what you would expect. That’s the pathway. We’re halfway along that pathway. Some farmers have almost domesticated species like the bamboo rat that breeds well in captivity and is widely bred. There is very little taking of those animals from the wild anymore. Civets are harder to breed than rodents and don’t produce many off-spring so you see them coming from wild and that’s a burden on conservation and a threat to health.
None of these animals are tested effectively from the disease. This is hard. Have to sample these animals and finding that they have a high burden of a certain group of viruses that could affect people and that’s a risk and needs to be dealt with and so we’re in a halfway zone of well regulated biosecure trace and a completely open wildlife trade and it’s a mixture of the two and a lot of gray areas in legal terms and we’ve been looking into this in China in particular
Bats were until a few months ago could be traded. Wildlife species are kept in captivity and traded openly. You need licenses to farm, to trade, to capture from wild. If you’re very careful as a wildlife farmer you can navigate the complexity and have a huge amount of activity and bringing them in from the wild and farming and it’s mostly legal.
MS: What do you say when governments ask what we should do?
The patchwork of wildlife trade stretches across southeast Asia and indeed the rest of the world. If China tried to control it, it would go underground, and people would just travel out of the country to get it. So you need a regional approach without a doubt.
Putting pressure on China is the wrong thing to do. China has already said it will ban the trade. That shows they want to do something. Chance to work with the intergovernmental Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the World Health Organization, the UN Food, and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health. FAO has put a lot of effort into understanding backyard vs intensive chicken farming, and there is a huge amount of effort around covid and a real opportunity for change. But it won’t happen with countries pointing fingers because it needs to be overseen by those agencies which China is a member of. Ideally, that’s what would happen. But this is politics. It will be messy.
MS: Do you need bigger and more capitalized farms to carry out biosecurity measures?
This has been done for poultry production in Asia. Extremely biosecure and very conscious of the threat of influenza to their business. It’s a threat of loss of business because it kills poultry as well as people. And there’s a reputational risk and focus on pork and poultry production. But those industries can teach other industries. Small entrepreneurs are trying to look to make money out of wildlife farming and there is a real push to tighten up
It could be that some wild animal species are fine for farming, but we need to find that out. You could go to the government and say we need to to to the producers and somewhere the viruses.
MS: Is your organization getting the money you need?
Any organization will say it needs more resources but we get good support from the US government. We do pandemic prevention and have been front and center for 15 to 20 years.
MS: So you’re saying don’t browbeat the Chinese?
It’s unfortunate that the pandemic emerged when the US and China are in a trade war. That doesn’t create the cooperation we need to deal with underlying causes. Our organization has been working in countries around the world. We work in 30 countries. That work is critical to be out in those countries where those viruses are about to emerge to where we want the world to and critical for the health and welfare of Americans and Europeans. We run analyses of risk of diseases spreading through air travel networks and the US is one of the most at-risk every time and we’ve seen both diseases get to the US the viruses will do very
If you look at the future trajectory of meat consumption it’s going to create a whole series of new pathways that pathogens can spread and that’s a problem and so if we’re going to move to higher meat consumption then we need to do it in ways that don’t create pandemics — that’s obvious — but we should also think of ways of reducing consumption in general and of consumption of luxury goods in the US and Europe which drives mining in African rainforests such as for rare earths for the iPhone, and luxury furs. Our consumption habits are driving pandemic risks and reducing pandemic consumption and get ready for the intensification of livestock production and need to do everything safer. We need to appreciate that one of the products of our influence over the environment is new pandemics.
MS: What do you say to those who say you can’t predict or prevent pandemics?
When I see that we have a bat origin coronavirus killing my neighbors here in New York, and I said over 20 years in the media that bat viruses are at risk, I say we did predict it! We raised the red flag! And they didn’t listen. It’s naive to say we didn’t predict these things. That’s what drives pandemics is human social-ecological predictions we understand how to predict from the viral sequence in wildlife and can even use those sequences and some of the work in china finding virus in wildlife allows drugs like remdisivir can be tested against these viruses. Our work predicted it and helps prevent these diseases and let’s do more of it. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand when we have proof of concept.
MS: Have we been too focused on climate too much when we should have focused on deforestation and the expansion of agriculture into forests?
I think so. We have 500 events of every emerging disease and hundreds of variables of why this happened here. Climate change isn’t, or hasn’t been up to now, a risk of pandemic risk; land-use change and deforestation have been. That’s what the science is saying. But under a future climate change, we’ll see significant pandemic risk and need to get ready for both.
There are economic and societal advantages to some of the activities that could be designed to reduce pandemic risk and deal with climate risk and more sustainable land-use change and the right places and doing it making productive to deal with both
Palm oil deforestation is profitable with timber and palm oil but you get spikes in diseases like malaria and leptospirosis and the cost of those diseases eats away at the profits or the land-use change and so you can optimize to reduce the land you convert and you don’t pay the cost of disease emergency down the line.
I’m delighted that people are feeling strongly about any environmental cause. If the climate is going to drive it then that’s great otherwise the planet is at a tipping point but in terms of biosecurity it’s something for governments to take on. Who pays the price? The economic fall-out will be paid for years to come. Governments need to act. We don’t need protests in the street.
MS: Is embracing intensification and wild animal domestication hard for the conservation movement to do?
I think the conservation movement will have trouble embracing concentrating production, but there are pitfalls around organic farming which tend to use more land and fewer pesticides and disease-resistant breeding. So you end up with a risk that’s been talked about in the disease press. Conservation corridors present disease risk as viral pathways. We’re not going to see pandemics emerge from Napa, California. Pandemics tend to emerge from tropics.
If it’s done ion a patchwork way there will be a higher disease risk. Factory farms are ugly. So let’s promote the sustainability of consumption. But where farms are going to be built, let’s put in place mechanisms. I’m not enamored by factory farming. The point is to think about pandemics.
MS: Do you worry about fragmentation in the Amazon?
I think you’re ahead of the curve on this. There was a lot of cutting forest for cattle production. There were policies to reforest using the natural forest to create corridors between fragments. That’s important work. It’s not that it was pushed out in a fragmented way. It was clear-cutting and then they reforested. That’s wonderful for conservation. There might be a disease risk. But we could work and do disease risk. Across the spectrum, we don’t take the pandemic risk seriously. But when one emerges we ask surprised. We look for someone to blame. We have known this.
MS: Is a paradigm shift required by conservationists?
We’ve always had this pragmatic attitude. We want to see change on the ground. Personally, when I visit a wildlife market in a southeast Asian market, it’s a shock. They are shocking places. The sheer ethical sight of animals in cruel conditions. It’s a horrible thing to see them chopped up and their guts thrown on the floor.
On the other hand, the markets have been there for 5,000 years and I don’t have any moral authority to assert over these people. I want to see the wildlife trade end. I want to get from A to B and so I’m pragmatic. If means legalizing a comfortable middle ground where some wildlife trade is legal, then so be it.
Same for land-use change. If we’re trying to reduce pandemic risk and people come out of poverty and we don’t completely convert the forest to pasture and if it requires working with the industry then, of course, we should do it, especially since they’re being hurt too. And now is the time to influence change. It’s almost our duty to work with industry.
We’ve been talking about deforestation and wildlife trade in relation to pandemics for a long long time. It’s not a concession to wildlife groups. They’ve been talking not through the lens of pandemics but conservation But all of them are now firmly in the camp of wildlife and deforestation drive pandemics let’s try to reduce them.
But many conservationists are now calling for an outright ban. That plays well to people in Napa and New York, and it sounds right. “We should ban this cruel and overconsumptive trade.” But it’s not practical and it won’t work. We won’t do that. We’re one of the few organizations calling not for a ban but for better incentive and alternatives and work with governments and communities
MS: Who is calling for the ban?
Wildlife Conservation Society, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International. We got together on a conference call and couldn’t agree. The big NGOs all have their donor base have different agendas. Nobody could agree to the language. All made their statements. We have unique access because we are in countries working collaboratively with academics and nonprofits and it’s a chance to leverage and work quietly with governments and industries and with industries to reform and if that’s through the corporate social responsibility framework win the west then great! In those countries, if it’s communities worried about illegal land use or governments worried. We’ve got to try every possible way. We need a focused agenda on pandemic prevention, deforestation, and wildlife trade.
MS: Would you call what you’re advocating, '“sustainable intensification”?
Yes, that’s the term. FAO is very deep on this and there’s the whole series of language about avian flu and how they’ve tried to promote one versus the other and different countries. In Vietnam, it became trendy to eat wildlife as a way to connect with your roots, while in southeast Asia and southeast China more interested in western food.
Government laws that are very opaque and poorly regulated industry and different communities and even if tightened up there is always a way around.
In Myanmar they cross the border to buy and sell jade and eat wildlife while they’re there. It’s not malicious. We need to find out what they are and expose them in a dramatic way and reveal the connectivity.
MS: Does there need to be a global ad campaign to make eating wild animals taboo?
That’s really happening with ivory with big-name celebrities in ads across China in the airports and where it matters, where people are trying to smuggle it in. You can still see ivory for sale in some parts of China. But it’s uncool to do that. We need to make eating wildlife uncool. We talked about it and now is maybe an opportunity.
You can imagine that conversation between the 20-year-old urban guy in Vietnam who goes back to seeing granddad eating bamboo rates and the granddad said, “Last year I got wild-caught, but this year is certified by the government as healthy and didn’t come from the wild!”
We’ve had that around fish. When people took Sea Watch cards and asked their waiter if it’s wild-caught or farmed? Where is it from? Is it sustainable? That could have been done in China with the iPhone.