Can You Still Hear The Whine From The Jungle? Or Is It A New Sound?
What if there is an other reason why the COVID-19 came to birth?
I did not know anything about this kind of cute animal before this year, but it seems like their living conditions and the trafficking and the value of their scales has been well know for a while. They even got their own day…
Out there in the jungle in Africa and Asia the Pangolin lives. The picture below is not a twisted pinecone. It is a Pangolin in protection mode, similar to how a hedgehog or armadillo protect itself against a danger.
We live on a planet that had changed dramatically lately. I am not talking about the last month. I am talking about the last decades when the impact from human activity has deteriorated the content of greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere close to a no return point and the fresh water and ocean acidification continues. Deforestation and destruction of biodiversity is taking us closer to a complete breakdown of our Earth at an uncontrollable speed never seen before.
This is how National Geographic describe Pangolins:
The shy, harmless pangolin is becoming increasingly well known for one reason: It’s believed to be the world’s most trafficked non-human mammal. Tens of thousands of pangolins are poached every year, killed for their scales for use in traditional Chinese medicine and for their meat, a delicacy among some ultra-wealthy in China and Vietnam.
There are eight species of pangolins. Four are found is Asia — Chinese, Sunda, Indian, and Philippine pangolins — and they’re listed by the IUCN as critically endangered. The four African species — the ground pangolin, giant pangolin, white-bellied, and black-bellied — are listed as vulnerable. All species face declining populations because of illegal trade. In 2016, the 186 countries party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the treaty that regulates the international wildlife trade, voted to ban the commercial trade in pangolins.
The Pangolin is mostly active at night and might not have been able to see or to protect themselves against all the changes in biodiversity. This could be all biodiversity changes but also the intruding from humans in their local living area and their fear for beeing captured by human hands.
This animal is the most trafficked non human mammal in the world. The scales are used for medicine and the meat appears on the tables to the super rich people mostly in Asia.
What do animals do to protect themselves against danger?
The Pangolins roll themselves into a ball to tell you to “leave me alone”. Other animals attack you like a tiger or crocodile and eat you.
They use the medicine mostly found in the plants in their living areas to cure sickness. This is just the way humans did before the white coats took over the care with their pills and monopoly to knowledge and resale now called modern medicine. Animals use the features of plants just like we use our knowledge to produce medicine mostly based ingredients from plants or from the food we eat to stay healthy.
Biodiversity is a keyword here to understand where I am heading.
The last months has shown the world and learned a lot of people how everything is connected. Maybe the connection to bad human behavior is closer to the outbreak of this pandemic than we thought from the beginning.
Who brought 7 tons of scales from these animals from Laos to Hong Kong in 2018 and another 28 tons of scales to Singapore in 2019? When the value of the shipment found in Hong Kong was half a billion $, then the value of the Singapore containers was $ 3 billion.
This is not a way the poor people on our planet make their income.
This is is about how the super rich people involve custom corruption, sleazy air and sea freighters and hide behind layers of closed doors and remote island tax evasion in their greed for money.
Maybe the COVID-19 pandemic did not start in a Wuhan late last year.
Maybe it started long before. This could be back in the ‘60 when the Agent Orange took the life area away from the bugs and habitants of the jungle, and some animals needed to develop additional protection to the ones the agent took away.
Maybe the Corona virus is a the new protection the Pangolins or Bats developed to protect themself against some sickness a bug or flea humans killed for another reason did for them. Or it could be the help they had disappeared because some fertilizer killed something in addition to another destruction.
Maybe we can find the natural protection they had and lost when their living areas was demolished by human activity and man made chemicals.
One thing is for sure. This pandemic is the outcome of human greed both for money and to build fences between the super rich and others. The fences is the money, but these fences could not stop the spread.
The funny thing is that all the traces found and seen on the different swagger apps will be revealing to a lot of them. The travelers brought the virus around the planet. The poor people don’t travel much but becomes more exposed just like the elderly.
This virus is scary to everyone and to some sense we might admit it is clever. And remember it don’t check your bank account before it strikes.
The COVID-19 virus possess a basic need to reproduce quickly, not very unlike how the greedy always want their greenbacks to do.
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Further recomended reading…
Elizabeth Kolbert — The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Maja Lunde — The History of Bees
This novel follows three generations of beekeepers from the past, present, and future, weaving a spellbinding story of their relationship to the bees, to their children, and to one another against the backdrop of an urgent, global crisis.
The next decade needs a new weekday, an 8th day to start refurbish our planet.
