Very interesting.

I just think it's wrong.

Going for bushmeat and frequently wet markets are the same thing as what we used to have in the US, with a lot of folks in the hinterland killing and eating squirrel and possum and armadillo. I'm sure there's an equivalent in South America, and Native Americans didn't have just 2-4 critters that they ate and nothing else.

Why zoonotic diseases didn't infect some of those people has to be a mystery.

Or perhaps they *did* infect those consumers of divers critters. However, with fewer people there were fewer jumps from critter to human. Isolation limited their spread--you may infect those in your neck of the woods, but you didn't get out of there very often. Even now there are diseases that aren't widespread--and some that have been kicking around for a while in backwaters that suddenly blossom.

There are a variety of rhinoviruses, coronavirses, and strains of influenza. It's not like they've been around for 100,000 years. They came from someplace.

Chikungunya was described in the 1950s, but it's unlikely it was discovered the year it made the jump.

HIV dates to the 1920s. Think about it--it was 60 years before it was noticed. Because it jumped from simians and circulated locally. I'm sure it got out from time to time, but didn't spread.

I'd accept that the frequency has increased. But a lot of diseases that jumped a while back are new-to-us. The "what we're doing to animals" is mostly a reversion to a prior wish: Here's yet another example that can be used to show how bad we are.

Except how bad we are now is how bad we've been since forever, and you wind up with people arguing for indigenous customs and practices while arguing that this is a modern practice.

what's up with that?

Coherent. Way to be.

Easy peasy.

even if every person on the world went vegetarian.
You can of course argue that it would slow the number of such leaps down due to a more restricted chance of it happening but it will not entirely prevent it.

After all consider the fact that even if we all went vegetarian we still have to grow the food and that takes a lot of land and water which means we still will come into contact with other species.
The only way truly to avoid contact with other species would be to leave the planet.

a virus leaping from an animal to human and creating another pandemic can happen anywhere in the world.

I suspect that humane farming, rather than keeping live animals in overcrowded conditions, peeing and pooping on each other and transmitting respiratory droplets and body fluids like they did in the Wuhan wet market, would probably suffice.

It should be the minimum standard of care for animals that are going to be killed and eaten. It’s literally the least that humans should do.

of birds not to mention the various burrowing and foraging animals.
Unless of course you did all your crops within an enclosed environment which might be problematic due to a large amount of materials you would need to build that many enclosures.