Crocodiles... the unexpected victims of pig farming?
How is an unlikely increase in the demand for crocodile flesh linked to pig farming and the spread of African Swine Fever? Claire Hamlett reports.
The demand for crocodile meat is on the rise in Thailand. One crocodile farmer, who raises 10,000 crocodiles and sells the meat at his restaurant, claims to have seen a 70 per cent increase in demand recently. Previously he had only sold a little meat each day and used the crocodiles mainly to supply the fashion industry.
Driving the new taste for crocodile skewers - and even crocodile penises - is the shortage of a staple meat in countries such as Thailand and China: pork. Since 2018, African Swine Fever (ASF) has torn through Southeast Asia’s pig farms, resulting in millions of pig deaths from the disease as well as from mass cullings. The shortage has pushed up the price of pork, triggering people and food businesses to look for meat from alternative sources.
The 1.2 million crocodiles farmed intensively across Thailand, along with those in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Australia, are often subjected to cruel living conditions and violent deaths, as revealed in investigations by PETA and the Kindness Project. The potential expansion of crocodile farming to meet the new demand makes these animals indirect victims of the pig farming industry, which is behind the spread of ASF.
ASF is thought to have originated in ticks present in some African countries, where it would live harmlessly in populations of wild pigs including warthogs and giant forest hogs. The domestication of pigs eventually helped it to start spreading in the first half of the 20th century. In the past few years, it has become a serious problem.
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The global nature of the meat industry means that it is easy for diseases to spread around the world and affect farms even when biosecurity measures are assumed to be adequate. Avian flu has spread in a similar way, turning from a relatively harmless virus among wild birds to something much more dangerous among farmed poultry, which are currently being culled in their thousands around the world.
The shortage of pig meat caused by ASF outbreaks may even have helped to trigger the outbreak of Covid when demand for meat from wild animals increased in China in 2019, according to one analysis on the possible origins of the pandemic.
While the spread of ASF through China has destroyed most of the small-scale pig farms in the country, large-scale pork producers are enjoying record profits and support from the government. The huge facilities that are beginning to dominate the pig industry in China, including the world’s largest pig farm, might be more biosecure, but they put huge numbers of pigs into increasingly artificial conditions.
Of course, the real answer to the problem of ASF is not bigger pig farms, nor diversifying into farming other species for their meat. The answer is much less animal farming. In China, 90 per cent of consumers say they would eat cultivated meat, while the plant-based meat market in Asia is projected to grow by 200 per cent by 2025.
Policymakers should be focusing on helping businesses and farmers shift into these industries and away from animal farming. It’s the only way to prevent more diseases spilling over from wild to farmed animals, and from animals to humans, and to save more species from the terrible lives that other farmed animals must already endure.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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