As the coronavirus – which originated in a meat market – continues to spread, PETA has just released brand-new video footage from PETA Asia of live-animal markets in Tomohon, Indonesia, and Bangkok, Thailand. The group is renewing its call for the World Health Organization to help close live-animal markets worldwide.
The footage shows humans wearing flip-flops walking across blood-soaked floors and handling pigs' raw flesh with their bare hands. Blood and rotting flesh covered the floors and countertops. Dogs, pigs, and a snake lay dead while flies buzzed around them; chickens and cats awaited slaughter in cramped cages; and bags packed with live frogs lay next to dead frogs' mutilated bodies.
"The next pandemic is right around the corner as long as sick and stressed animals are crowded together in blood-soaked meat markets," says PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk. "PETA is calling on the World Health Organization to help shut down these dangerous operations, whether they're killing chickens in New York or cats in Indonesia."
Deadly outbreaks of swine flu, avian flu, SARS, HIV, hoof-and-mouth disease, mad cow disease, and other zoonotic diseases have stemmed from capturing or farming animals for food. Live-animal markets are perfect breeding grounds for diseases, which can jump from various other species to humans, since stressed, injured, and sickly animals are commonly caged in public areas and on sidewalks – where faeces, blood, and offal can contaminate buyers and sellers and be tracked into restaurants or homes.
PETA Asia has called on the health ministers of Indonesia, Thailand, and other Asian countries to close "wet markets" there, but it has yet to receive a response from any of them.
