Zak Smith, Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, works to safeguard some of the world’s most iconic and at-risk species.
Until recently, the wildlife trade, for many Americans, was a disturbing, but far-off, concern. Every so often, Twitter would erupt in outrage over pictures of someone engaged in trophy hunting, or the occasional Florida Man would have a run-in with an escaped pet python in the Everglades. But, over the last few months, the wildlife trade has hit very, very close to home, in one of the most disruptive possible ways. Many of the early COVID-19 cases were people who had direct exposure to a live animal market, where farmed and wild-caught exotic species were stacked in cages as they waited to be sold and slaughtered. This unnaturally close contact — among species that would rarely or never meet in any circumstance other than through the wildlife trade — creates ideal conditions for animal pathogens to jump species barriers.
Smith and experts discuss the boundaries of China’s Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park, part of China’s ambitious new national park system. The territory is home to about 30 Siberian tigers and 40 Amur leopards, which need non-fragmented habitat for their populations to grow.
“The epidemiologist Larry Brilliant once said, ‘Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,'” science journalist Sonia Shah recently wrote in The Nation. “But pandemics only remain optional if we have the will to disrupt our politics as readily as we disrupt nature and wildlife. In the end, there is no real mystery about the animal source of pandemics. It’s not some spiky scaled pangolin or furry flying bat. It’s populations of warm-blooded primates: The true animal source is us.” Photo by Glenford Nuñez.
In recent weeks, as Covid-19 has killed thousands, brought public life to a standstill and crippled global markets, the pandemic has been called a “black swan,” a term investors use to describe severe events that are unpredictable and extremely rare. But this coronavirus was no black swan to the scientists and journalists — including our guest, investigative journalist Sonia Shah — who were paying attention to the environmental, social, and political conditions that fuel the eruption and spread of infectious diseases. Shah and scientists she writes about have been warning the public for years of the mounting risk of a pandemic like Covid-19 and the ways in which our treatment of animals and our planet can cause unseen, but deadly, consequences.
It’s now widely known that Covid-19 originated in wild animals before jumping the species barrier to humankind. It’s not alone. Roughly two-thirds of all emerging infectious diseases begin in the bodies of animals, mostly wildlife. Microbes have spilled over from animals to humans for time immemorial. But, as humans dominate the biosphere, the pace at which pathogens are making that jump is getting faster and faster. SARS, Zika, H1N1, Ebola, HIV– and now COVID-19 –can all be traced to how we are interacting with animals and their habitats.
“From cows, we got measles and tuberculosis; from pigs, pertussis; from ducks, influenza,” Shah writes in Pandemic. “But while animal microbes have been spilling over into humans (and vice versa) for millennia, it’s historically been a rather slow process. Not anymore.” You can buy Pandemic here.
Sonia Shah has spent years diving into the origins of pandemics and the complex interplay between humans, animals, and pathogens. The disease backstories that Shah has investigated are powerful illustrations of the devastating costs of treating human health as independent of animal and planetary health. Shah is the author of five critically acclaimed and prize-winning books on science, medicine, human rights, and international politics. Her work has been aptly called “bracingly intelligent” by Nature and “dazzlingly original” by Naomi Klein.
“Truth, no matter how unfortunate or unsavory, needs to be told,” Amanda Hitt says. Photo by Charlene Lim, courtesy of Government Accountability Project.
In an age where almost everything we eat is produced outside of public view, whistleblowers are critical to maintaining the integrity of our food systems. These principled insiders are often the first people to warn the public — often at grave personal cost — when food is unsafe, when workers face inhumane conditions, when food labels mislead consumers, and when animals and the environment are being abused. But who defends these front-line defenders?
Attorney Amanda Hitt has been a champion and visionary for protecting and empowering food system whistleblowers for over a decade. Hitt is the founder and director of the Food Integrity Campaign of the Government Accountability Project (GAP). Based in Washington, DC, GAP is one of the nation’s leading nonprofits dedicated to whistleblower advocacy and protection. Hitt’s clients have included USDA food safety inspectors in ultra-high-speed slaughterhouses, contract poultry farmers faced with exploitative contracts and company retaliation, and animal researchers privy to taxpayer-funded waste and cruelty.
Hitt and Government Accountability Project CEO and Executive Director Louis Clark present an award for truth-telling to former contract poultry grower Craig Watts at the Food Integrity Campaign’s 10th Anniversary Conference in 2019. Photo by Charlene Lim, courtesy of Government Accountability Project.
In addition to litigating whistleblowers’ cases, Hitt and her team work to draw public attention to these whistleblowers’ stories and to turn their revelations into systemic legal reforms. In this episode, Hitt takes us inside the world of animal agriculture industry whistleblowers. We speak with Hitt about her clients’ stories and motivations, the patchwork of laws that provide protections and redress for whistleblowers, the reality behind her video game “Bacon Defender,” and why food animal welfare, public health, and worker rights are inextricably intertwined.
In 2018, the Food Integrity Campaign launched Bacon Defender, a satirical online game that draws attention to corporate greed in our feed system and challenges the Trump-era deregulation of the pork industry.
Founder and Director Amanda Hitt at the Food Integrity Campaign’s 10th anniversary conference in fall 2019. “I’ve witnessed horrible outcomes as a consequence of whistleblowing [for the whistleblower],” Hitt says. “They take a huge personal hit. But not one whistleblower, in the twelve years of my doing this, has ever said [they wouldn’t do it again] if faced with the opportunity … They know there is no sense in playing a game where one of the players is changing the rules.” Photo by Charlene Lim, courtesy of Government Accountability Project.
