The love of wild animals in China dates back to the third century BC! But how did Chinese animals eat meat of these animals, and why did their deadly love to eat these animals despite their health risks?
A study - published by the newspaper "Bild", and reported by "Duchi Villa" - deals with a popular joke in Germany that a Chinese tourist returned from his trip to Germany happy because he found many types of cans of meat and large bags bearing pictures of cats and dogs in food stores, but it turns out that later He was in the pet food section.
Dog meat, for example, is not on every family’s table or on the menu of every restaurant in China. It is mainly a regional dish, not a Chinese habit. With the popularity of cats and dogs as domestic animals in China, domestic criticism has escalated against eating “a human friend”.
Eating wild animals has been a part of Chinese cuisine since the 3rd century BC. The famous Chinese philosopher "Mencius", speaking in his writings at the time about the difficulty of choosing his favorite food, he says: "I like to eat fish, and I like to eat pumice bears. If I can't get the two, I'll choose the bears' slippers. ”
Bears are considered one of the foods considered in the Chinese tradition, and it is one of the eight Chinese foods that have also been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. Most of the results of treatment with these animals, most of them have not been proven in modern human medicine.
Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners gave this kind of treatment attractive and promising names to encourage its use. For example, bat secretions are called "Yeh Ming Sha" or "sand treasure that lights up at night," but it was not called by it that they knew, for example, that it transmitted viruses to humans. The general rule for those substances used in traditional medicine is: the more rare they are, the more popular they are, which is the manifestation of the illicit trade of centuries of rhinos.
The popularity of wild animal meat, according to studies dating back to the Qing period, was the people of "Jurchen" who inhabited the Manchuria region at that time were the ones who introduced wild animal meat to Chinese cuisine.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the country experienced a three-year famine period, at which difficult time people were eating whatever they found. But after the end of the years of poverty and economic growth, the demand for eating wild animals increased because it became a symbol of the prominent social status. The only hope is that laws will be firmly enforced by the authorities to prevent more pandemics in the future.
Elizabeth Maruma Mariama, the United Nations executive secretary to the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, demands that the common concern of humanity be the closure of all markets for the sale of wild animals in order to “prevent more pandemics in the future,” the British Guardian newspaper reported. China is not the only country where this risk is present. Ebola in Africa and the Nipah virus in Malaysia are also transmitted from wild animals to humans.