Dear Editor,
I write in response to your Letter page of the 24th May 2020 captioned: `Sloths, other animals, being traded from Mabaruma in breach of closed season’.
I am writing in my capacity as the Secretary of the charity “Caribbean Vegetarian-Vegan Community” [CVVC], which is based in Barbados, and as someone who has been on a plant-based diet for fifty years for animal rights’ reasons.
The CVVC aims to raise awareness as to the human health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet. It has as its mission statement: “The promotion of a plant-based diet to improve human health; protect the environment; facilitate social justice; and reduce animal cruelty”.
The “carnivores’ virus” Covid-19, which is making the news at present, apparently began in China from the eating of bush meat that had the virus, which then jumped the species boundary as did Swine and Bird Flu, SARS [from civet cats], Ebola [from bats and chimpanzees], MERS [from camel eating in the Middle East], and HIV [attributed to the eating of chimpanzees]. The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 which has been sourced to Kansas poultry, killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people. Many contemporary human diseases, started out as zoonotic diseases. It is hard to establish with certainty which diseases jumped from other animals to humans, but there is increasing evidence from DNA and RNA sequencing, that measles, smallpox, influenza, and diphtheria, came to humans this way. Had humans stuck with a plant based diet, in all likelihood none of the above diseases would have been an issue for humans.
The negative effect of a meat diet on both human health and the environment is well known, and is the contemporary global driving force for the adoption of a balanced plant-based diet. [See for example the film “Game Changers” on Netflix].
Leaving aside strong animal cruelty concerns, and threats to bio-diversity, the eating of bush meat ought to be banned outright as being a severe danger to human health. We need to learn the lessons from inter alia Covid 19 and Ebola viruses. It is not just the participants of this abhorrent practice who are risk, we all are being exposed to danger as a result of their myopic actions.
Yours faithfully,
Lalu Hanuman,
Attorney-at-Law,
and of the “Caribbean
Vegetarian-Vegan
Community” Charity,
Barbados.
