COVID-19, other zoonotic diseases and wildlife conservation
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COVID‑19, other zoonotic diseases and wildlife conservation Carlos Santana1
Received: 15 August 2020 / Accepted: 29 September 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Many experts have warned that environmental degradation is increasing the likelihood of future pandemics like COVID-19, as habitat loss and poaching increase close contact between wildlife and people. This fact has been framed as a reason to increase wildlife conservation efforts. We have many good reasons to step up conservation efforts, but arguments for doing so on the basis of pandemic prevention are rhetorically, ethically, and empricially flawed. The COVID-19 pandemic is exceptional in its impact, but as a zoonotic emerging infectious disease (EID), it is anything but unusual. In fact, the majority of EIDs originate in non-human animals, and since the 1940s the frequency of EIDs has trended upward (Jones et al. 2008).1 Since EIDs like Ebola, SARS, and COVID19 cause incredible harm, and since the risk of EIDs may be increased by global environmental change (ibid), a plethora of voices have argued that the risk of future pandemics provides a compelling reason to engage in additional wildlife conservation. Most prominently, activists and politicians have called for bans on wildlife trafficking and the sale of terrestrial wildlife in so-called ‘wet markets,’ as a bipartisan group of American political representatives did in a letter to the director of the World Health Organization (Booker et al. 2020). Some researchers have argued for even stronger conservation measures, arguing that the economic costs of pandemics justify scaling back economic development, since excessive development raises the risk of future pandemics (Di Marco et al. 2020).It would be a nice silver lining if one 1 This note belongs to the Topical Collection “Seeing Clearly Through COVID-19: Current and future questions for the history and philosophy of the life sciences”, edited by G. Boniolo and L. Onaga.
* Carlos Santana [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA
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response to the current pandemic was increased support for wildlife conservation. In this note, however, I’ll highlight the ways in which these calls for conservation may backfire, could be racist and colonialist, and are empirically suspect. Society has long recognized the risk of zoonotic disease, but policymakers have rarely treated this risk as reason to protect wildlife. On the contrary, animal-borne disease is usually seen as a reason to eliminate wildlife, as attested by widespread and ongoing culls of bats, rodents, wild ungulates, and other organisms known to transmit disease to humans and livestock. Our most up-to-date science suggest that culls are often counterproductive, and can increase transmission rates (Streicker et al. 2012) as well as foster emergence of novel viral strains (Turmelle and Olival 2009). Policy, unfortunately, isn’t beholden to the science, and wildlife elimination re
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