Follow the Virus?

It's a long and complex story, with many areas of uncertainty, but the development of the Covid-19 agent appears to be in the tradition of viruses 'jumping' between domesticated animals and our own species (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/is-factory-farming-to-blame-for-coronavirus). In deed, one school of thought believe that the first Influenza viruses can be linked to the Chinese domestication of ducks some 4000 years ago. Although it's debatable, Covid-19 probably went from bats to pangolins to humans. It is argued, by some folk, that factory farming of chickens (good incubators in their dense monocultures of viral strains that also facilitate transmission by the close proximity of birds to human workers) by big organisations may have provided an impetus. In China, undercut smallholding farmers appear to have been pushed into farming wild animals (by these exotics being branded as 'luxury' products rather than subsistence items) in locations nearer the forests populated by virus-transmitting bats. None of this is certain but it does seem evident that we need to look carefully at our methods of raising animals for human consumption, if we want to limit the abilities of viruses to move to human hosts.