People calling for a ban on exotic animal markets in China are making two major mistakes.
Firstly you are buying to the western MSM manufactured, racially motivated smear campaign against China.
People have been eating wild animals since there were people. Let’s not forget the 2009 American Swine flu and many bird flu outbreaks over the years.
And no, it is not just people in ‘backwards’ communities that eat wild animals in this day and age as the western MSM like to imply with its disproportionate and highly biased focus on the exotic animal meat reporting.
People, rich people at that, proudly hunt and eat wild animals all over Europe and America. Rabbit, duck, geese, pheasant, deer, wild boar and countless other wild animals and hunted and eaten by the same westerners who are trying to pain the Chinese as uncouth and unreasonable for daring to buy their dinner from a market, when they would shoot and eat wild animals who most certainly does not come with a food safety certification.
So long as people continue to eat animals, then there will remain the chance that a virus that originated from animals would jump species. The obsession focus of the western MSM on the seafood market has nothing to do with science or safety and everything to do with victim blaming to try and create the narrative that China somehow ‘deserve’ this outbreak.
Secondly, just look at the war on drugs. How’s prohibition working on that front?
And yes, exotic meats are not addictive like hard drugs such as cocaine or heroin, but it is very similar to ‘softer’ drugs like cannabis in that it is a lifestyle choice. OTOH, highly addictive substances like alcohol and nicotine are legally sold all the time. So legalisation has zero correlation to the additiveness of something.
If we look at the cannabis case study, legalisation has massively reduced crime, improved safety and even generates tax revenue and boosts local economies.
As such, the key to combating the issue of exotic meat trade and consumption should be not prohibition, which would only drive such practices underground, which would make the health and hygiene dangers far worse instead of better; but instead commercialisation, reduction in price and more stringent food safety standards is what real world case studies prove is most effective at reducing the risks from such consumption habits.
However, I suspect that for some or most of those who loudly demand a ban and ridiculously disproportionate punishment for offenders; at least part, if not the whole reason for your stance is an emotional reaction to the aforementioned Western MSM smear campaign and you somehow think that banning exotic animal meats would make the western MSM stop making disparaging remarks about China
If that is the case, I have some truth for you, no society is or can ever be perfect. So long as the western MSM is determined to find something, anything to attack China with, they will find it. Nothing China does will ever change that. Not even total capitulation to the west.
No matter how far China goes to appease such people, it will still never ever be remotely enough.
The only effective response is to give zero what the west thinks and instead only look at what is most beneficial for China. When China is rich and strong enough, what the western MSM thinks or says will matter as much as what the Indian media thinks or says about China today.
