BLOG: The news today has been awash with headlines about the 2,000 pet hamsters in Hong Kong due to be culled in a knee-jerk reaction to the discovery that some have been infected with coronavirus. This is tragic enough, but they aren’t the first non-humans to suffer as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. What lessons should we be learning?

Hong Kong has announced this week that it is to cull 2,000 pet hamsters after detecting coronavirus in some. While there has been only one proven case of an animal passing Covid-19 back to humans - other than its theorised origin in a wet market in China - this isn’t stopping authorities in Hong Kong from applying its ‘zero-Covid’ strategy to hamsters.

Hamsters, however, are not the only animals susceptible to Covid-19. Cats too can be infected, particularly large cats, as can deer. The discovery of coronavirus in wild populations of white-tailed deer in the US has worried scientists due to the risk of ‘spill back’ from animals to humans.

Regular Surge readers may also recall that the culls which preceded the long-overdue demise of mink fur farming in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and elsewhere in Europe were also the result of covid infections detected among mink populations. While the culling of 17 million mink in Denmark alone is a tragedy of an unimaginable scale, dwarfing the loss of human lives due to Covid-19, many mink farms are not expected to recover from the government-ordered culls despite receiving financial compensation.

• INTERVIEW: Carl Valentin, Denmark’s first vegan MP, on Covid-19 and the death of the mink fur industry

And then there are the vaccination programmes being enacted at zoos across the world, from infected lions and pumas in Johannesburg, South Africa, to the rare snow leopards who tragically lost their lives to the disease in Lincoln Children’s Zoo in Nebraska, US. These are just a few of the 625 outbreaks of Covid-19 among animals recorded by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), affecting 17 species in 37 countries to date.

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So where does it stop, and will we see more animals culled in a bid to limit the spread of Covid-19? Evidence suggests that the virus can infect all mammals, and there is a concern that different strains can arise from species acting as ‘reservoirs’ for the disease in that they may not succumb or show any symptoms, but can still carry the virus and provide the conditions necessary for the evolution of new strains, any one of which could prove more transmissible or more deadly to humans.

Arguably the most concerning variant so far, Omicron, is thought to have acquired its mutations while spreading between mice for more than a year, according to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

When then can we expect a cull of all mice, or all big cats, or all white-tailed deer? It’s impossible to say, but what is clear is that we humans have brought this upon ourselves. It is widely accepted that the Covid-19 causing coronavirus most likely originated in bats before being passed to an intermediary species. We don’t know for sure if that intermediary species was in fact pangolins as was once believed, but many of the earliest outbreaks in humans were traced back to workers at the Huanan Seafood Market in China.

Wet markets and indeed any situation where humans come into regular and sustained contact with a variety of animals - or even just one species in the case of intensive farming - exponentially increase the risk of new zoonotic diseases crossing the species barrier. All of the major epidemics and pandemics of modern times, since the 1900s, can be traced back to farms - such as the 1918 flu pandemic which killed millions worldwide - or other examples where humans exploit animals for food or compete for land and encroach on natural habitats.

With Covid-19, pandora’s box has already been opened and we are likely to see many more non-human casualties in the months or even years to come. We did this, but we can learn and reduce the risk of it ever happening again with another zoonotic disease - we must do away with factory farming forever.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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