In 2010, British singer and animal rights advocate, Morrissey, called attention to the sort of Chinese “wet markets” which led directly to the Wuhan virus outbreak.
“If anyone has seen the horrific and unwatchable footage of the Chinese cat and dog trade – animals skinned alive – then they could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation[…]Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.”
Naturally, the last sentence sent the Guardian-reading left into a frenzy of hand-flapping, pearl-clutching, screeching denunciation. But, seeing the horrors that are wet markets, you can’t blame the animal rights crusader for getting just a bit narky.
Especially when it looks like they haven’t learned a damned thing from the Chinese virus.
Terrified dogs and cats crammed into rusty cages. Bats and scorpions offered for sale as traditional medicine. Rabbits and ducks slaughtered and skinned side by side on a stone floor covered with blood, filth, and animal remains.
Those were the deeply troubling scenes yesterday as China celebrated its ‘victory’ over the coronavirus by reopening squalid meat markets of the type that started the pandemic three months ago, with no apparent attempt to raise hygiene standards to prevent a future outbreak.
As the pandemic that began in Wuhan forced countries worldwide to go into lockdown, a Mail on Sunday correspondent yesterday watched as thousands of customers flocked to a sprawling indoor market in Guilin, south-west China.
Here cages of different species were piled on top of each other. In another meat market in Dongguan, southern China, another correspondent photographed a medicine seller returning to business on Thursday with a billboard advertising bats – thought to be the cause of the initial Wuhan outbreak – along with scorpions and other creatures.[…]The market in Guilin was packed with shoppers yesterday, with fresh dog and cat meat on offer, a traditional ‘warming’ winter dish.
China now has the unmitigated gall to turn its propaganda machine to blaming everyone else for what they unleashed.
‘Everyone here believes the outbreak is over and there’s nothing to worry about any more. It’s just a foreign problem now as far as they are concerned,’ said one of the China-based correspondents who captured these images for The Mail on Sunday.
The correspondent who visited Dongguan said: ‘The markets have gone back to operating in exactly the same way as they did before coronavirus.
‘The only difference is that security guards try to stop anyone taking pictures which would never have happened before.’
[…]Now, after a dramatic fall in infection rates within China, the Beijing government is promoting conspiracy theories that the outbreak did not begin in China at all. A discredited story, shared widely on China’s Weibo social media platform, claims coronavirus was first detected in Italy in November.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials have promoted groundless conspiracy theories that the US Army brought the virus to its shores.
As former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson recently said to Douglas Murray: “We should have never have lost our understanding of the simple fact that a communist is a communist. In the end, a communist will behave as a communist does”.
In the end, too, for all the Guardianistas’ right-on hyperventilating, Morrissey was right about the cruelty and indefensibility of China’s wet markets.
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