China Still Has a Wildlife-Meets-Public Health Problem — 3 Years After the Pandemic Began

A new law in China to curb traffic in wild animals contains loopholes that risk another pandemic, according to virology and conservation experts. 

China’s Wildlife Protection Law went into effect earlier this month, but the loopholes allow animals to be kept in conditions that could lead to “spillover” events, in which viruses leap from wild species to the human world. 

“These measures fall far short of the changes required, given China’s prominence as a destination for both legally and illegally sourced wild animal parts and derivatives,” said the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a UK-based non-profit. 

In a March report, international scientists identified the raccoon dog, a fox-meets-raccoon animal native to East Asia, as a potential source of the initial COVID-19 spillover. Raccoon dogs were sold at the market in Wuhan, China. where an early cluster of COVID cases emerged.

As with other COVID origin theories, this one isn’t ironclad, but one thing is clear: China still has a wildlife-meets-public health problem.

The new law includes a sweeping set of rules and recommendations – reforms China promised soon after the COVID-19 outbreak. But experts say the loopholes are large enough so that a raccoon dog – or any number of other wild animals -- could still spark a future pandemic.

China has cracked down before

For decades in China, wild animals have been poached, sold, and raised for food, fur and traditional Chinese medicine.

China also has a checkered history of cracking down on the trade.

In 1988, China passed its first Wildlife Protection Law, establishing a list of protected species. But the law contained exceptions even for those species, and wild animals outside that list could still be sold. 

When the SARS epidemic broke out in 2003, scientists traced the virus to markets in China’s Guangdong province that sold palm civets – small, bushy-tailed mammals native to Southeast Asia. The government responded by banning the trade and consumption of palm civets and all other wild animals, but that ban was quickly scrapped under pressure from China’s animal farming and trade industries.  

After the early COVID-19 cases were tied to the Wuhan market, public health officials enacted another ban, but it was weakened as well, when the Ministry of Agriculture published a list of 16 species that could be raised for meat, eggs, milk, and fur. 

The animals that are bred for the fur trade, including raccoon dogs and civets, “are very good reservoir hosts," said Alice Hughes, an associate professor of biological sciences at Hong Kong University. In other words, they can easily transmit viruses from another species to humans.

The latest restrictions – and where they fall short

Conservation and public health advocates had hoped that the latest Wildlife Protection Law, which went into effect on May 1, would finally end – or at least put a significant dent in – the farming and traffic of these creatures. But experts say the loopholes are gaping.

There are still carve-outs for various uses of wild animals. Even the most protected species can still be raised at wildlife farms and traded for public exhibitions, medicine, and other undefined “special circumstances.” 

Experts say the wildlife farms are potential breeding grounds for human diseases because the animals are often held in cramped, unsanitary conditions, and therefore more likely to be stressed and sick. And every exception in the law poses another risk that a human will come into contact with a diseased wild animal – and a new virus will have a chance to leap from the animal to the human realm.

A matter of money

Why would the Chinese government, with the wounds of the COVID-19 pandemic still fresh, leave the door open for future pandemics to “spill over” from wildlife to humans? Many of the reasons come back to economics.

The Chinese fur trade is a multi-billion-dollar business, and the government has promoted wildlife farming for poverty alleviation in rural areas. Some communities in rural China also have long-held traditions of hunting, raising and consuming wild animals. 

Hughes was living in rural southwestern China in the early months of the pandemic and saw those practices persist despite the government bans. “There was a bit of a shift in attitudes initially,” she told The Messenger, “but that did not last.” She still saw traps and other signs of bat hunting in Yunnan province after the pandemic had broken out. Bats are known sources of coronaviruses.  

Experts say that solving the problem will require alternative livelihoods for people working in the wildlife industry. Hughes said that growing and harvesting herbs used for medicine and mushrooms are among the ways China might help wean rural areas off the illicit trade.

“We still need to work to balance the risks versus the livelihoods of these people,” she said, “and to try to find ways that both protect them and their livelihoods whilst also safeguarding everyone's health."

For now, the risks remain. The Wuhan market has been shuttered, but under the new law, a raccoon dog or other creature on a wildlife farm in China could still spark another public health nightmare.

Avinash Basker, a policy specialist at the EIA, put it starkly: “The benefits of essentially  any form of wild animal farming should be assessed against this potential cost.”