People have started to eat less meat from wild animals due to the corona pandemic. In a survey commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), nearly 30 percent of those surveyed indicated that they have started to eat fewer wild animals because of corona or have stopped eating them altogether.
Nearly half (46 percent) of survey participants believe that animal-to-human transmission of disease is the most likely cause of pandemics ahead. The Chinese (91 percent) and Vietnamese (84 percent) in particular see closure of so-called wildlife markets as the most important measures to prevent new pandemics. The coronavirus may have originated from bats, which infected humans for the first time through a different host, experts from the World Health Organization WHO concluded after research in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic started in 2019.
Research agency GlobeScan surveyed residents of China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand and the United States for WWF. Of the Chinese surveyed, 28 percent said they were eating less wild animals due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In Thailand, that number nearly doubled from 21 percent in 2020 to 41 percent this year. By contrast, nearly one in ten (9 percent) of those surveyed in the five countries say they continue to eat wild animals. The World Wildlife Fund published the research on Saturday on the occasion of the annual meeting of the WHO.
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