The uproar over the way animals were kept in the market and the clear knowledge that the market caused the human pandemic has forced the Chinese government to act.
There is a new law being enacted which bans the sale of meat particularly bat meat in the market, which alone has the potential to save 50 to 100 million animals a year.
Unfortunately though this will not not extend to stop in the slaughter of animals as fur sales will be allowed.
This seems to be rather foolish as it is not the eating of the animals that give people coronavirus but the fact of the animals all squashed into a smaller space in contact with one another and humans. As such while it is fantastic that so many animals will be spared from being eaten, there are likely to be many million that are killed for their fur, which means the likelihood of a future pandemic emerging from the same market is high.
The simple fact is that there is inherent risk harvesting wild animals. This runs from the simple facts that there are too many humans and therefore any meat that becomes popular is likely to pushing the species to local extension, to the fact that harvesting of wild species is likely to regularly cause illnesses to jump into the human population and the fact that when we take out a species from an ecosystem we don’t know the impact that it’s likely to happen and regularly this can turn out to be rather dramatic leading to ecosystem collapse and a loss of all the other human services that it provides.