After almost 100 people connected to a West Melbourne abattoir operated by Cedar Meats tested positive for COVID-19, PETA has written to the company and suggested that it choose a new direction: stop killing animals and switch to producing vegan meats instead.

COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease caused by a virus that originated in a meat market. But long before this novel coronavirus emerged, potentially lethal viruses were already crossing the species barrier to humans from other animals.H1N1 (swine flu), which originated in pigs and killed as many as 575,400 people in the year after it began spreading in humans, was traced back to a US factory farm. H5N1 (bird flu), which can be contracted by humans who come into close contact with infected live or dead birds, has a mortality rate of up to 60% and is considered a concern by the World Health Organization because of its potential to mutate and become highly infectious via human-to-human contact.

Of course, the Cedar Meats COVID-19 cluster has not been caused by the slaughtering of infected animals. Nonetheless, abattoir workers are proving to be particularly vulnerable during the pandemic. More than 4,900 workers at meat-processing plants in the US have also contracted the virus, nearly 4% of the industry’s workforce.

Then of course, there’s the fact that breeding, confining, and slaughtering animals heightens the risk of the emergence of deadly pathogens – no matter the country. In a paper published in 2018, Belgian spatial epidemiologist Marius Gilbert found that more “conversion events” for bird flu – in which a not-very-pathogenic strain of the virus becomes more dangerous – had occurred in Australia than in China.

As the global death toll from the coronavirus pandemic climbs to over 300,000, we’re being given a stark warning: we can no longer breed and slaughter sentient beings – who suffer immensely – for foods we don’t need without grave consequences for human health.

Brands such as v2food, Tofurky, Beyond Meat, and The Meatless Farm Company are growing as more and more people choose to eat vegan. Even meat producers such as Tyson, Smithfield, Perdue, and Hormel have invested in the global vegan food market, which is projected to be worth around AU$49 billion by 2020. In Australia, the demand for plant-based meat products is forecast to generate 6,000 full-time jobs and add nearly AU$3 billion to the economy in the next 10 years.

There has never been a better time for businesses like Cedar Meats to make the vegan switch, and we’ll be on hand to help them if they decide to.

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