H5N1 bird flu has killed millions of caged birds and at least many thousands of wild birds and mammals. H1N1 swine flu has been almost as deadly and threatening. Many leading experts believe it is only matter of time – and not that much time – before bird flue and/or swine flu make the leap to infecting humans.
More than 70 billion innocent birds and mammals are raised in tortuous conditions in filthy, massively overcrowded barns all awaiting their painful transitions to our dinner plates. Not only is this almost unimaginable cruelty horrible enough to affect and motivate anyone who sees it, their decrepit environments are the perfect places for terrifying zoonotic diseases to grow, spread and evolve. Most major pandemic-level diseases including HIV/AIDS, SARS, Ebola and most likely Covid spread to humans through people eating animal flesh.
How do we stop the next pandemic? The same way we can mitigate climate change, water pollution and depletion, soil erosion, species extinction and loss of biodiversity and large-scale species extinction, as well as limit heart disease, colon cancer, type 2 diabetes, and a whole host of other human maladies. Stop. Eating. Animals! Better, yet work to create a large-scale transition to a plant-based diet. Quite literally, our collective future depends on it.