Conservation Lessons From COVID-19

When the first cases of COVID-19 were first reported there was some confusion over what pathogen was causing the disease. However, there was no confusion as to where the virus originated from as several of the first people with the virus had been to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was a wet market, a market where live animals are sold. The wildlife in these markets range from domestic and farm animals to products of the illegal wildlife trade. One heavily trafficked animal, the Pangolin, is theorized to be the source of the disease. However, China is not the only country with a wet markets, and Pangolins are not the only trafficked animal. Increasingly birds are ending up in wet markets, and this is most evident in Indonesia. Indonesia is rich in bird biodiversity, or at least it used to be. New studies have come out saying that more Indonesian birds live in captivity than they do in the wild, and frankly that should not be a surprise. Indonesia has a massive bird culture. Owning a bird in Indonesia is a status symbol, and one way that this manifests is through birdsong competitions. These competitions- which are frequented by government officials despite the fact that it is widely known that many of the birds are poached- are fueling the illegal wildlife trade in Indonesia and other nations in Southeast Asia. The sad fact is, this problem is not one that is going to be solved anytime soon. The Indonesian Government and other Southeast Asian governments clearly care much more about the competitions then the birds themselves, and they willingly go along with the obviously false claim that many of the birds are bred rather than poached. COVID-19 has once again brought attention to the fact that wet markets are dangerous places where disease can spread, but it has distracted us from so many other issues facing birds. For example, energy companies in Texas have been taking advantage of COVID-19 to destroy the Golden-Cheeked Warbler habitat in order to create a new pipeline practically unnoticed. While people are spending their time tweeting about how “nature is healing” bad things are happening to wildlife. We should spend our time paying attention to the environmental problems we need to solve rather than fake evidence that those problems are going away. Wet markets caused this mess, we should learn from our mistakes and end them, and all the while pay attention to the other disasters going on, because problems do not occur one at a time.