In 2004, authorities in southern China ordered the slaughter of thousands of civets, a cat-like mammal thought to have transmitted SARS to humans. At the time, China was in the middle of a crackdown on the wildlife trade — a huge business that supplies exotic cats for restaurants, pangolin scales for traditional medicines and much else. China’s wild animal markets, once an urban fixture, were to be a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. As recently as 2016, officials estimated that the legal breeding of “wild” animals for markets and medicine cabinets was a nearly $75 billion business, employing some 14 million people.
Now the emergence of a global pandemic thought to have originated in a Wuhan wet market has prompted the government to try again: It recently banned the trade and consumption of wild animals outright, including those bred on farms. It’s a crowd-pleasing order, but it’s destined to fail, thanks to an array of powerful cultural and economic demands.