Published 3:15 AM EDT Apr 8, 2020In the mid-2000s I was a journalist based in Shanghai and I came upon what seemed like a great story idea.China’s economic rise had created a fascinating dynamic with the animal realm. While a growing middle class had started having pets (which were frowned upon in the recent past as a bourgeois luxury), attitudes generally towards animals were lagging far behind economic growth, to say the least.With no animal welfare law in all of China, abuses towards animals went unpunished. A fetish site at the time that featured women in stiletto heels crushing kittens caused an uproar, but it couldn’t be formally punished.

Similarly, some had started speaking out about certain traditional Chinese medicine practices, like imprisoning moon bears in tiny cages with catheters inserted in their livers to extract bile (which has dubious benefits and can be easily synthesized chemically), but the practice went on unimpeded.But it was Chinese eating habits that really captured my attention. Unique conditions for human sicknessI started covering the story not long after the SARS crisis had subsided.

I made my way south to Guangdong, where there is a saying that the locals will eat “anything that flies except a plane, and anything with four legs except a table.” The infamous wet markets, which sold a huge variety of exotic animal species like porcupines, raccoons and otters, had been temporarily cowed by a government clampdown when I first began to investigate this story. These shutdowns would unfortunately prove to be short-lived.These wet markets were reported to have been the birthplace for SARS and now, science tells us, are the possible origin of COVID-19, which started supposedly with the consumption of pangolin or bats kept along with other wildlife in unsanitary conditions in Wuhan’s wet markets. When I visited the markets, the strangest animals for human consumption to my western eyes were turtles, snakes and frogs. Gone were the civet cats (who likely passed SARS to humans), wolf cubs, monkeys and many other exotic animals, which until recently were sold openly.Chinese government: Blame the Chinese Communist Party for the coronavirus crisisBut even with clampdown at the time, it wasn’t hard to connect with people who whispered of the horrifying conditions that the market operated under. Before SARS, the markets were a Noah’s Ark of terrified animals of seemingly every variety, often sick and/or injured, housed closely together before being slaughtered in unsanitary conditions. It was a perfect birthplace for novel viruses to intermingle and leap and mutate to humans. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty ImagesI would later learn that the Chinese appetite for these animals and the conditions they were kept in weren’t the only genesis for disease creation in China. Chinese animal husbandry practices were such that people frequently lived in close proximity with their livestock, often keeping these animals in their homes. In fact, the traditional character for home, jia, features a pig under a roof, which shows just how elemental this type of arrangement has been in Chinese culture.

Wet markets are named after the melting ice used to preserve the food, as well as the constant washing of the market floors when they are covered in blood from the animals. The calls for a. Now the despicable wet markets used by some Chinese people — markets already responsible for the Sars outbreak in 2002 — have finally.

Pigs, like birds, have a distinct biological ability to share their viruses with humans compared to other animals.The combination of living closely with animals, in particular animals that can share their diseases with humans, with a centuries-old tradition of eating strange animals and/or using them for medical purposes, combined with unsanitary conditions, created a uniquely fecund environment for human sickness.Hotline: Share your coronavirus storyAs if this wasn’t bad enough, it was easy to find a level of cruelty towards animals that was shocking. In Beijing — where pet dogs had been abandoned en masse by their owners when false rumors circulated that dogs could carry SARS — I met a man who had dogs he was ready to sell as pets and others he would happily slaughter for dinner. Cat meatball restaurants weren’t all that hard to find in Shenzhen. Seemingly every seafood market featured fish that had been cut open alive and placed on ice to show hearts still beating to prove how fresh they were.Rising wealth in China had led to rapid and massive growth of industrial meat production, which, combined with no animal welfare law, created horrible conditions for billions of animals. Desire for shark fin soup — which has little natural taste and is simply a status symbol — was threatening to wipe out the global shark population. The list went on and on. I left China partly over animal horrorsIt is said that a society’s attitude towards animals is often a bellwether for its sense of justice and kindness. I found these attributes sorely lacking in China and after a few years decided to leave, in no small part because of the horrors I uncovered while doing research for my animal welfare story.Now we’re faced with the uniquely devastating challenge of COVID-19.

Senior leaders in the U.S. Government, led by President Donald Trump, have taken to calling it “the Chinese virus,” or variations thereof. This should be loudly condemned as it has led to racial targeting of Asian-Americans.

Calls are coming to crack down on China's wet markets, which some suspect are the place where the coronavirus could have first infected humans.Such markets are known for selling live animals such as cats, dogs, fish, rabbits and bats. Wet markets are named after the melting ice used to preserve the food, as well as the constant washing of the market floors when they are covered in blood from the animals.The calls for a crackdown on these markets stem from China's decline in coronavirus cases over the past few days. Following this reported drop, many wet markets in the nation began to reopen, despite speculation that the virus jumped in these places from an animal to a person, leading to the worldwide pandemic. Bullet force hacked. A number of animals have been identified as possible culprits, including bats and the endangered pangolin.'

The origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market,' said Gao Fu, director of China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, at a press briefing in January.A recent story in the Daily Mail details how these wet markets have reopened following the end of China's two-month lockdown.' The markets have gone back to operating in exactly the same way as they did before coronavirus,' a correspondent who visited a wet market in Dongguan, in southern China, told the Daily Mail. 'The only difference is that security guards try to stop anyone taking pictures, which would never have happened before.' The correspondent added: 'Everyone here believes the outbreak is over and there's nothing to worry about anymore. It's just a foreign problem as for as they are concerned.' A seafood vendor, right, wearing a face mask talks to a customer at a wet market in Shanghai on February 13.

Wet markets have begun to reopen following the decline in coronavirus cases in China. Noel Celis/GettyAccording to the Daily Mail, a medicine seller in a Dongguan market featured signs advertising bats, scorpions and other creatures as a healing remedy, while another market in Guilin, in southwest China, offered cats and dogs in cages, ready to be killed and sold.One of the reasons the virus has been traced back to these wet markets is that a similar virus infection, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), is also thought to have originated there.Australian outlet News.com.au recently published a story citing a 2007 research paper from Clinical Microbiology Reviews. In the paper, the researchers studied the 2003 SARS outbreak and warned of a similar virus coming from the wet markets in China.' Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination, which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks,' the paper said.

'The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb.'