Pros And Cons Of Slaughtering

Once a spillover already occurs, mass murdering animals will not likely stop the spread from person to person directly. It could possibly cut down on animal to human, but if many people are already infected from zoonosis, killing animals after the fact will not do much. That is like taking vitamins to boost your immune system after getting sick. In order to effectively prevent as much spillover as possible, the reservoir and most populous hosts must be identified and killed before they are able to pass it over to humans. That, or once there are only a few known cases. The government can murder thousands of animals known to have or carry a disease, but as long as they are not the only animals that are carriers, mass culling a species or two
will not easily prevent the disease from spreading from another source. It almost seems too much to be worth it. Economical damage, ecological damage, time, resources, money, compensation for farmers, when killing X amount of animals is not necessarily going to end or even reduce spillover and transmission, nor are mass killings of any kind ever ethical.
In the event that there is clustered cases of a disease from a specified source/animal that can be pinpointed down and identified as an issue and/or the reservoir, then it would be beneficial to mass cull those animals, whether confirmed infected or even just exposed.
This way, the outbreak can be nipped in the bud, which is great. If it always worked like that. Unfortunately, mass culling is more trouble than it is worth, and is not a guaranteed solution, and it is the slaughtering hundreds or more of innocent and potentially harmless animals, which is certainly not ethical.
In the case of SARS, the exotic animal palm civets were linked to the transmission of Coronavirus, aka SARS, to humans that consumed them. After this revelation, the Chinese government put a ban on civets. In Spillover, David Quammen reveals, “The ban inevitably caused economic losses, generating such foofaraw from animal farmers and traders…” (191). Farmers were not happy at their lost revenue and declining businesses. Farmers specific to raising this animal were basically told they could not work, is that ethical to take someone’s job and livelihood
away? The ethics behind telling people to give up their jobs is not even the biggest issue here, what is disgusting is how the mass culling was delivered. After SARS ended in 2003, and civet farmers were once again allowed to raise these animals, one more case had occurred, prompting the Health Department to go to civet farms to suffocate, burn, boil, electrocute, and drown over a thousand palm civets (Quammen 192). All because of one woman. Again, suffocate, burn, boil, electrocute, and drown. In no way are those killings humane. Those animals were not deserving of that kind of treatment. If officials thought this was the right call, they could have taken the creatures’ lives by faster means that would not cause pain and suffering like that.
The issue was that, despite best efforts, civets were not the culprit, so the disease remained after the mass civet culling.
Not to mention the fact that killing masses of wild animals could majorly throw off and disrupt food webs and ecosystems, mass slaughter like this does not mean what is killed is the actual reservoir or only host. Quammen says, “…infection of civets didn’t necessarily mean that civets were the reservoir host of the virus…” (191). They were merely an amplifier host that allowed for easier access of the virus from animals to human, so killing all captive or wild civets will not stop the transmission (Quammen 195). All that time, money, work, and brutality spent, and for what? It did not take out the reservoir, just a helpful
amplifier.
To further support this, when there was mass culling of sheep and goats during Q Fever, more farmers had work taken away from them, with only some compensation, and all the animals murdered was due to speculation of disease after a quarter million vaccinations (Quammen 233). Vaccinations and culling on government expense, at that. The Q Fever murders were based off fear, not even firm evidence of mass infections. Quammen relays, “Despite all measures…Q fever did not disappear,” (233). Again, more killings done, little to no progress made. The ethics of mass murder, and the costly detriments financially, seem to highly outweigh the benefit that any mass culling of animals with or without diseases could have on a society.