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Opinion | For a better post-Covid world, start with our treatment of animals

Name: Wet markets in Wuhan struggle to survive despite lifting of China’s lockdown to fight Covid-19
Uploaded: 2020-06-11T17:00:22.000Z
Duration: 2 min 27 s
Description: Wet markets in Wuhan struggle to survive despite lifting of China’s lockdown to fight Covid-19

We can prove what ‘better people’ we have become by showing compassion towards all animals

Think of those creatures we torture in the name of ‘research’ that spend their entire lives incarcerated

Reading Time:2 minutes

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Caged dogs at a market in Yulin, in China's Guangxi region. Photo: AFP

Stephen McCarty

Published: 1:00am, 12 Jun 2020Updated: 4:55am, 12 Jun 2020

Much has been made of how, when Covid-19 is beaten, or at least beaten back for a while, we might all come out of these extreme circumstances as better, more compassionate people. And how we might unveil a new-look world.

Around the globe, untold practical difficulties are being faced: keeping jobs, putting food on the table, making sure the lights stay on. Then there is the psychological suffering. Radio shows abound with wits’ end tales of chronic incarceration, the crushing boredom of imprisonment we don’t deserve and segregation we didn’t ask for from our loved ones.

Now consider those problems from the point of view of the countless millions of animals we exploit – factory “farmed”; confined to torture chambers masquerading as laboratories; held year upon year in marine-life “attractions”; confined alone for decades in concrete zoo pens; put to work in circuses; snatched from herds on the plains; held immobile in barbaric conditions to produce useless, pointless traditional Chinese “medicine”.

And, of course, stuffed into cages in vile Asian “wet markets”, with which the wider world is, finally, becoming familiar.

02:27

Wet markets in Wuhan struggle to survive despite lifting of China’s lockdown to fight Covid-19

After a few weeks of going Covid crazy, we were scaling our four walls, breaking down, self-pitying. Now stop to think of how many animals spend their entire wretched lives in a state of permanent lockdown, with no hope of escape, rehabilitation or even a touch of kindness.