But for many rural communities, the village commons and forests yield the only easily available source of protein. The pandemic has brought renewed focus on our relationship with nature, especially the negative aspects of human-wildlife interactions. Those with links to bats, pangolins and other wildlife — hunters, ‘poachers’, wet market operators, meat eaters — have all been implicated. Instead of training our guns on ‘poachers’ and forest-dwellers, we have to deal with our own hypocrisy. However, for any one of these events to become a pandemic, a set of additional conditions is necessary.

Source: The Hindu August 29, 2020 11:03 UTC