 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all the people that are connected. I see your name going down on the list of attendees and a few names that I recognize. We are going to try in 30 minutes to give you a sort of a broad overview of the whole issue of wild meat and the use of wild meat and this has been triggered by the unfortunate event that we are all living now, which is this COVID-19 pandemic, which has now affected more than 2 million people in more than 180 countries. And that very likely originates from a virus jumping from an animal to another animal for humans and then humans contaminating themselves. So it's a zoonotic disease and these zoonotic diseases are not very new, but this one brings them back to the forefront and also the importance of the issue of wild meat. There have been a lot of people, I would say, uploading the fact that China decided to close the wet market, but fundamentally the problem is that a lot of people depend on wild meat for their everyday source of protein or fat or resources and the situation is not that simple and a complete ban is never a very good answer. So we are going to see how we can address and explain this challenge and can we find some middle ground on this complex reality. Now we'll ask my panelists to introduce briefly themselves to tell us what they do exactly in the world of wild meat and starting with ladies, Alta Betty Porter, Lauren, Natalie and Jordan Lass. Hi, my name is Lauren Code. I'm a research fellow with C4 and also with the University of Oxford and I work at the Bushmeat Research Initiative at C4. My experience with wild meat is that I did my PhD in Gabon and I lived in Gabon for a few years studying local hunting practices in villages in central Gabon. And then I lived in Cambodia for a while or I did some small scale studies on wildlife use in the Cardamom Mountains and since then I've been working on a number of wild meat projects that focus on sustainable wildlife management with C4 and Oxford. Hi, I'm Natalie Van Blyth. So I have been working on wildlife and wild meat issues for the last 20 years. Basically, my experience is more in Central Africa and more recently in the Amazon. And I would say that even more recently, I've been lucky enough to discover about wild meat use in the Caribbean, which I think is a very much understudied region in terms of wild meat use. It has been very interesting. So my focus is really on the links between wildlife and livelihoods, understanding the importance of wildlife for the people that use it, either for food or to protect their crops. There are many reasons why people use wild meat. And yes, I guess my research and my colleagues' research is really to help policymakers develop policies that are well-informed in terms of how to sustainably use wild meat. But on the other hand, I'm very interested in the rights and the culture of people that have been using wild meat for centuries that continue to use it sustainably or not, but to have their voices heard at the policy-making level. Hello, my name is John Fah. I have been, basically, I'm an animal ecologist. My profession, my PhD, was on those sorts of issues. I've been working on management of endangered species for quite a number of years, but also the whole issue of how wildlife is used by people in different parts of the world. I have been working on the issue of wild meat now for about 30 years. My first experience was in the Petrol Guinea, and we have continued working in Africa and South America. And recently we started doing some work in Asia as well. My interest is very much to understand that middle ground between the ecology of wild species in natural habitats and what people need from these animals, and really come up with ways in which we can balance the needs of wildlife and the needs of people. Thanks, John. So maybe, John, you can start by telling us what is wild meat, actually, and how does it fit into the wildlife use more globally and for the local people and other communities. The actual definition is very simple. We're dealing with the flesh of wild animals that are being consumed by people throughout the world. I would venture to say that wild meat is even the rabbits that we catch in Europe or the parteries and everything else, as well as the infinite number of animals that are consumed throughout the world. An estimate of that goes to about 2,000 different species, different parts, different regions of different animals, but essentially anything from snails to elephants are being consumed as wild meat in different parts of the world. The definition of wild meat is the one that we're currently using. We try to keep the term bushmeat more to the African situation. The Latin Americans, for example, have a particular view that bushmeat, the term bushmeat should be applied early to Africa, whereas in the context of Latin America, it's more game or wild meat. So these are semantics to some extent, because essentially we're dealing with wild animal flesh that's being consumed by people. Thanks, John, and maybe, Lauren, you can continue in saying a few things, for example, what is happening with the kids in China now. Yes, I think one of the important things to note, I think John's brought up, is that wild meat is used all around the world and it's used by local communities as an important source of protein and nutrition, but it's also used in urban areas, in small regional towns, but also in large urban areas. And in China, there are these wet markets that we're hearing a lot about. Often when we've been hearing about wet markets in the news, it's been focused on the wildlife trade, but wet markets actually include a range of different species, domestic, livestock, fish, wildlife, and also plants. And it's one of the main ways that urban Chinese get there, buy their fresh produce. But that's not just limited to China. We see wet markets all around the world, whether it's in Central Africa or South America, or whether it's in Cambridge going to the local fishmongers. So this is, well, wildlife use is very much global. I think the importance of wildlife for people changes depending on situations. So we have local communities, very rural local communities in places like Gabon or other areas in Central Africa where people are very much dependent on wild meat for their livelihoods and for their nutrition. But people in regional areas, in regional towns in Central Africa are also very dependent on wildlife for their nutrition. And this is bought through wet markets. Thank you. Maybe you can continue, Lauren, and telling us what is the connection between this consumption of wildlife and the emergence of infectious or zoonotic diseases? So the emergence of zoonotic diseases, obviously, is incredibly important. And more than 60% of infectious diseases originate from animals and of those about 70% come from wildlife. The question is how the infectious disease is transmitted from the wildlife to humans. And that's where it becomes a bit more complex than just talking about wildlife trade. So more than 50% of outbreaks of zoonotic diseases since the 1940s have been linked to agricultural intensification. So we don't just have an issue with direct consumption of wildlife spreading zoonotic diseases. It's also that we have increased land use by humans. We have increased livestock production, increased agricultural intensification. And all those things are bringing wildlife into much closer contact with humans and spreading those zoonotic diseases. So we really have to think about how human activity is spreading the disease transmission. John, can you tell us a bit of the work that we have done in terms of this issue of degradation and zoonotic disease? As Lauren says, I mean, there are many different ways in which human beings can come into contact with wildlife. Certainly through the consumption of wild meat is one way of doing that. What we have tried to do through C4 and our partners, we have tried to look at the problem in different scales, at different scales. We've done, the team in C4 has done a lot of work on the ground, working with different communities, monitoring what is being consumed, how much is being taken out, and what is the relationship between the people and the wildlife itself. We have taken it one step further with our work using models to try to understand the possible spread of disease in Africa primarily, but we have other work going on to look at the possible contact between humans and wildlife and disease in other parts of the world. So our work with the University of Malaga in Spain has been primarily to look at ways in which we could distinguish which sorts of animals could potentially be the reservoir species or the transmitters of the disease, such as A disease, such as Ebola. Ebola is actually sort of transmitted by a filovirus, it's another type of virus, very similar in many ways to a coronavirus, and our work has actually shown where it is more likely to contract that virus or where the virus is in more favorable conditions, and that's very important for us to understand. But we've also looked at ways in which the altering of the environment in which the virus is in does affect the possibility of transmission, and that's our work on deforestation, for example, I've shown quite dramatically that deforestation occurs two years before an outbreak is a very good correlate of what is going to happen in the future. In other words, when you disrupt trees, when you disrupt forests, when you upset the balance of viruses and pathogens and animals and people, then that's when you're most likely to get outbreaks such as Ebola. We've looked at the 27 different outbreaks that have occurred, and we've looked at the relationship of deforestation by actually doing very extensive satellite imagery and looking at what's happening in these areas. So, you know, the point that comes out from all the work we've done is that it is not just, it is not good to blame, to point a finger at a particular species or an interaction between species of wild meat and people. It has to do with the root causes of all this, which really has more to do with how we disrupt nature, how we do away with the balance of nature, how we do away with forests and how that creates new conditions for viruses and pathogens. So, we have a jump from an animal to a human and then after people contaminate people. So, then there has been some very blunt answer in terms of should we have a global ban on wildlife trade, reducing zoonotic diseases and what will be the in fact of such a ban on wildlife threats and wildlife use. So, maybe Natalie, you can start and your view about that. Yes, so on one hand, on one hand, many countries have already banned wild meat trade in many countries is already forbidden to trade wild meat. It's often even forbidden to hunt because the legislations are done in a way that if you look at the legislations closely, you will see that most of the hunting is actually happening illegally. So, I don't really think that the ban right now would change things unless suddenly we have enormous capacities from those countries to actually enforce current regulations. I mean, in the face of these emergencies, countries have put a lot of money in enforcing regulations that we would have never thought would happen, like keeping people at home for so many days, which you know, it could be that countries decide like China to actually really enforce those bans in the future. In that case, in that case, I think the ban could be, I mean, we have to look at it in different ways. I think, of course, for people that really rely on wild meat, which are mostly rural people, most of them indigenous people that have or kept the knowledge and the skills for hunting and that continue to rely on hunting as a main source of food or as a very important safety net, those would be the people that are most affected if hunting or when we trade is banned and if the ban is enforced. Now, people living in medium-sized towns, we have different situations. We have middle-sized towns where white meat is still very important, particularly for the poor because it's still a cheap source of animal protein. And there's not a lot of a lot of other alternatives. That's the case, for example, Kisangani five years ago was in that situation where you had, this city was coming out from conflict, was in a post-conflict situation. There was still very little access to domestic sources of meat. And so white meat and other non-timber forest products were the cheapest way to acquire proteins for people even in that urban area. So we also have other medium-sized towns where domestic sources of meat are very much available. If you take the example of Leticia in the Amazon or let them in Guyana where I'm working now, you know, you have plenty of other sources of alternative proteins. You have beef, you have chicken and eggs, you have industrialized meat. So white meat is not really a necessity. So banning the trade would affect a very limited number of stakeholders for which I don't think it's too difficult to find alternatives and to help convert themselves into other livelihood activities. In my opinion, it's not really the ban that we change how people view white meat. It's more people's perceptions, fears that will actually affect attitudes and behaviors towards white meat. Whether it is a ban or not, these pandemic has really created fear on people in different ways. I think for a lot of urban people that we're consuming or are consuming white meat at the moment, since they have a choice, they might think it twice. We already see this trend in Kisangani where urban people are starting to respond and saying, now that we are aware that Ebola comes from white meat, we don't want to eat white meat so much anymore, which is not the case for rural people who say, Ebola or not, I have always been eating white meat and I continue to do so because I don't have any choice. On the other hand, I think that rural people are more and more conscious due to what's happening now at the moment that their livelihoods has become too dependent from the outside world, from the markets, from chicken coming from the neighboring countries, from Brazil, industrialized food coming from everywhere in the world, and their food security is at risk when suddenly you have to close boundaries, you have to close villages, entire communities. In Guyana, for example, entire communities are closing, are locking themselves down. So the only source of meat now is fish and white meat again. So I think people are starting to think, we need to be clever enough to maintain those skills and knowledge about wildlife, about how to use wildlife sustainably because that's the only food source that we might have in case of crisis. So I think one of the interesting things that we will have to look at in the future is actually how people have changed their behavior in the face of these pandemics, which has, I think, surprised everyone in the world, whether you are from urban areas, whether you come from the tropics or from temperate regions. I think this has changed a little bit the thinking in terms of how do I ensure my food security in the future in case of crisis. Thank you. Now we have had a sort of a view of the local people and the views of the wild meat, but Lauren, what will be the impact on the conservation of biodiversity in terms of this various policy implemented or not implemented? So I think first of all there's a really good blog on this, there's a piece on this in the conversation, it's written by Dan Challander that I urge people to go and read, but the starting point that Natalie made, many countries have already got trade bans in place and those trade bans aren't really working for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that there's very little enforcement of the trade bans and another reason being that the laws surrounding hunting are quite difficult to enforce, they can be quite opaque and a lot of them need to be re-evaluated, but further than that I think that we haven't got that much evidence that trade bans reworked that well, so there was a small study on a trade ban that was enforced in Equatoria Guinea in the Malibu markets in 2007 and while they found that when wildlife trade was banned in Malibu there was an initial decrease, quite quickly afterwards the trade rebounded and actually hit higher levels than before the ban because of the lack of enforcement. The other issue is that if you do ban trade and if you are effective in banning that trade then what it can do is it can push the trade underground into illegal markets and that can in some circumstances increase the amount of trade that's organised by criminal gangs and if you do that then regulating that trade is very difficult, so if you have a more regulated legalised trade then you're able to enforce more put-in-place standards for hygiene and for welfare whereas if it's completely made illegal then that can be really difficult to do so I think we have to think of a balance of of regulation and enforcement for some species. Alisa, I'll pass that on to John now, what he thinks? Certainly true, I mean I know the example of Equatoria Guinea in the Bioko because a trade was the trade of primers actually mostly monkeys was actually stopped and then immediately afterwards because there was no enforcement the whole thing went back to normal or even you know worse than normal. People do react as Natalie said and you know people will react and not purchase meat after Ebola for example in Africa and you know studies that have been done in Nigeria and Liberia show that people will not eat that and you know there is that fear element that comes in but it's because people themselves are making a decision not to eat the meat it's not because you know the authorities are telling them not to consume so it is rather complex and it's very complex even more complex the further down the line you go I mean enforcing that in rural areas how on earth are you going to do it with rural people the indigenous people why should you be doing that when these are people that rely a hundred percent from the meat that comes out of the forest and there's a point that I'd like to make actually because we we tend to think that these viruses are forever through killing anything and anyone that comes into contact with them let's also remember that indigenous people and people living in in forests have been exposed to these viruses and pathogens for many many many many years and there's plenty of studies out there that actually show already that there are clinical expressions immunological expressions within these communities of exposure to viruses that could be very very important for us to understand as a means of coming up with new ways of dealing with viruses or pathogens so my general point is that we have got to take into account everything again my my my you know constant reminder that we are have got to look at the bigger picture we can't just deal with things on a one-to-one basis and without really understanding the interactions and the networks and the the knowledge we can obtain from doing this properly and for us as researchers I think it's fundamentally important that we understand this more global more macro way of looking at things so that we can come up with possible solutions to the problem and that's what our team has been doing for all this time before going back to Lorelle and Natali with the issue of changing and one thing that we we need to to remind people is that the large amount and Lorelle told us of the the zoonotic disease they didn't come from wild meat and they came from domestic animals and and if you you ban wild meat wildlife on a wet market but if you let the chicken the pigs and and other whales you are still going to face a problem of potential huge pandemics it's something that has been a little bit underscore in the in the current crisis although now people seem to think that the coronavirus the current one could have jumped from bats to stray dogs near this market and not via pangolin so not proof but certainly Natali do you think that if a new one pandemics appear again the wild meat consumption will be different or people will forget as you know? No I think I do think that there will be a long-term impact in terms of consumption behavior I think we really need to measure this after COVID because I think COVID was the is the first pandemic that has been that has had impacts all over the world in temperate regions in tropical world so Ebola was far away in Africa for many people in the world Ebola was only in Africa so it was still far away I think now these pandemics come closer to people I think they will they will have a change in terms of how people view white meat consumption yeah what what I wanted to say as a follow-up to what Lauren was saying is that if we where white meat is an informal market it never benefits from the support that other formal market chains have to control food safety measures to increase the quality to access micro-credit to be able to have access to a nice refrigerator or a clean clean tools to work and to butcher your meat if you look at bushmeat markets and wild meat markets in most of the places bushmeat is being sold at the back of the market where you're not too visible but you don't have access to clean water you don't have access to a lot of things that actually would support and would help traders to reduce their risk in terms of you know becoming the spillover that could happen when they're cutting and butchering the meat and also so because I think it's important also to remind that the spillover doesn't happen where people when people consume white meat and that's sometimes it's difficult to make the difference right because people think it's the consumption of white meat which is a problem it's not really the consumption is actually the trade and the handling of white meat which exposes people to zoonotic diseases that could spill over to humans so if white meat trade could benefit from the same support that formal trade chains have in terms of improving food safety and so on I think we could we could perhaps reduce their risk and the contacts the risk of spillovers between white like the direct ones right the direct spillover from wildlife to humans because as Robert said even though in our minds we have these numbers that 70 percent of the zoonotic diseases come from wildlife it's important to understand that most of those actually use domestic animals as as vectors so they don't directly spill over from wildlife to humans in many cases they actually use domestic animals as as an as you know as a as a vector between wildlife and humans it's the case of nipah virus for example that jump from bats to pigs and then from pigs to humans right so I think those are a number of things that we need to remind ourselves when we think of simplifying the problem and oversimplifying a potential wrong solution yeah exactly when when you have armor everybody looks like a name yeah uh Lorraine you wanted to add something yeah I think just adding to Natalie's thoughts there that um this is this is definitely a global problem it's not a problem um for Central Africa or South America or people who eat um eat wild meat um in in rural areas it's a it's a problem for all of us um we have very globalized food systems and we have a rapidly increasing global population and this is an issue of how to feed that population sustainably and in a way that isn't going to um keep on having huge impacts on our our natural world you know we're the the reason why we're getting this increase in zoonotic diseases isn't just um but showing of wildlife in in places in the in the global south it's um it's our production of it's our intensification of agriculture for products like soy um and palm oil it's the um deforestation rates it's our increasing need for for more livestock and so I think hopefully this can be seen as a as a time when we all think about our the way that we consume and think about how we can change those consumption patterns as a global community um to make sure that we're not having such drastic impacts on nature that's a big question we will learn the lesson we will see here after the um we have been talking for more than 30 minutes now I have a few questions typed by the the floor and I will uh write a few and then read a few and then he wants to answer answer so let's say by the first one which is about the nutritional advantage of food product for free range livestock swine and poultry have been highlighted shouldn't the nutritional dimension also be incorporated in the wild meat discourse not only the zoonotic risk john you want to talk about the nutrition on that thing about that um yes there are nutritional advantages of free range livestock and so on but the end of the day it has to do with what is the potential to produce sufficient amounts to cover the needs of millions of people you know it's all very good to have free range chickens etc but you know is it accessible for you know the poor and all that often these these sorts of things in our country is for example these sorts of products are very much a middle class type of commodity rather than so we've got to look at ways and I mean following on from what Lauren is saying just that apart of the problem that we have nowadays is that the need for for more and more food to be accessible to to more and more people has actually pushed us into this corner where we have to industrialize the way that we produce um animals on plants and all that so I think we have to look at and perhaps slow food is more of the solution than than we thought it was and we certainly have got to do away with practices that just produces animals or plants in an unregulated manner so there are advantages of these free ranging animals there but let's not kid ourselves this is this is not for everyone we have to look at ways in which we can produce sufficient food for the masses without going into the situation that we're in at the moment difficult question yeah I have a question from South Africa is it safe to say the illegal trade is happening in most countries because the government often fails to follow a participatory approach before making ban regulations that affect people's livelihood Natalie yes I I do think that most of the regulations have have been inherited I mean at least for for the countries that were colonized in the past which is the case for the whole Latin America the whole Africa and also parts of um of Asia the regulations were inherited from the colonial times and they have changed a little bit but changed in a very chaotic way so we end up with regulations that are unclear that are full of gaps that do not represent people's realities and where people have never been involved in the discussion in terms of how do those regulations represent the reality which is what regulations should do right they should represent the society and they should represent what the society thinks is right or wrong right and I think this is where participatory process are very important I think I think I could congratulate the efforts that Guyana as a country is is doing at the moment trying to develop new regulations for wildlife trade and wildlife use involving the different regions trying to reach out to the different regions of different community groups so I think this is the this is where we should be I think trying to go in terms of understanding the different stakeholders views those that are the primary producers of white meat the hunters and their families and then the rest of the stakeholders that are involved so how do you involve the traders what is the vision they have uh how do they think they are concerned if you talk to them they are concerned about sustainability because it's their business so they could be engaging in a in a constructive manner to co-develop those regulations in a way that is more consistent representative of realities and more adapted to the different contexts yeah I have a question that is a bit of follow-up on that and looking at the scientific evidence on the relationship between ecosystem degradation and zoonotic transfer is this current pandemic not a reminder of the importance of regulating and reducing extractive industry which is opening up forest dialogue in growth rather than yet again trying to criminalize indigenous and oral people who wants to say something about that since I know Simon may maybe I can answer that question now there is evidence ungrowing evidence that as you disrupt ecosystems and certainly tropical rainforest then you're going to have that the outbreaks of diseases I'm more likely to happen and there's mounting evidence that as you open up forests more people are in contact and there's a wonderful paper that came out recently that shows that there's more contacts between non-human primates and humans in in more open areas as you open up forest we know from our own work that fruit bats tend to be much more common and and where the areas are much more favorable where humans are actually opening up forests so the opportunities for these jumps of viruses from animals to humans is much more likely that is mounting evidence that's enough information now to actually tell the world that we have to stop the way that we do things in terms of deforestation for oil palm or whatever and try to come up with solutions to that problem and as Simon says it's not a question nobody should be pointing a finger at indigenous people the rural people for what they're doing and it's really a different problem it's a macro problem much more related to extractive industrialized forms of altering habitat and that lesson has got to be learned and the good thing about COVID in a way you can call it that good is the fact that this event is affecting the pockets of people of the the people who have a lot of money basically it is an economic crisis as well as a natural crisis so it should be very clear to everyone that we have to go back to the root cause of these issues and for us to understand better how we should be protecting these habitats and the people within them yeah which brings us to the question this economic from our colleagues on traffic and it's beyond the direct impact of action by government to address COVID-19 such as ban what do you see as some potential impact of the wider political and social economic change that are likely to occur such as the likelihood of a deep economic recession as a result of the lockdown so so what will happen if in places where people are already barely strapping by already lower than in terms of economic possibility and will people move back to the village with people in presenting what what what do you think will happen Lauren yeah I think this isn't being talked about very much at the moment and you know we've seen COVID sort of increasing first of all in in China and then in in Europe but there can be there's if it if it does start to increase in Africa and South America we're going to see some really devastating impacts on people who are already struggling so there's going to be the economic impacts and obviously the the health impacts and when we've seen quite a lot of urbanization over the last sort of 20 to 30 years especially in Africa when people come under economic and social strain they tend to move back to the rural areas and we may see some of that urban to rural migration as a result of of this current virus when that happens people often need to fall back on to safety net activities as well such as such as hunting and so one of the hypotheses is that you may find that people become more dependent on wild resources as a result of of coronavirus but this is all very much hypothesis thank you so I'm looking at the question that's trying not to so then the question asked Natalie talk about changing behavior she said that the ninth virus came from bats to pigs I want to know more about this concept of changing behavior what must we do now Natalie what up to you well I think first first I think we really need to understand people's perceptions and values regarding wild meat in a changing world because we tend to actually see the world as static and we forget that things are changing very quickly so for example villages that were eating a lot of wild meats 10 years ago might not be doing so right now everything changes even before we are able to even publish our own research so we have to look at it you know as a dynamic system understand in these new in these constantly new contexts particularly with trends of increased urbanization increased disconnection from nature even from the young generation even from people born in rural areas and living in rural areas this disconnection with with nature what does it mean for people's behavior towards wild meat consumption towards hunting and so on I think we need more of that understanding right now and and then use that information to suggest communication strategies environmental education strategies that are adapted culturally to different contexts and that can be yeah that can be actually adapted and that can help change behaviors towards what a given government wants to see or a community wants to see because of course the decision has to be legitimate so it has to be initiated from leaders local leaders national leaders and they they need to I guess open up the debates on what they want to see how they want their food security to be in the future do they want it to be dependent from other countries do they want it to be based what I'm seeing now for example in the indigenous communities where we are working in Guyana now is that local leaders are using networks Facebook Instagram and so on to come up with messages saying we need to keep our culture see what's happening now the only way we are resilient is because we still know how to hunt we still know how to fish so we we have to see we have to see what understand what local leaders want what national governments want and then perhaps support with this evidence of how people value what needs provides some ideas of how to how to build behavior change uh campaigns which I think are could be very powerful can be very powerful yes I I also wanted to uh yes go ahead so just one thing I do agree with these extractive industries and any other human activities that actually disrupt natural ecosystems and bring people closer to nature natural environments I also think that the world is learning how to be urban right now because very recently not so long ago we became urban we were mostly rural 10 years ago more or less we are now urban and now we have to live with a lot of problems that are due to our urbanization processes and if you look at diseases zoonotic diseases peri-urban areas growing peri-urban areas are particular hotspots for zoonotic diseases still overs so I think rethinking uh urbanization rethinking uh now that we're learning how to work remotely maybe you know there's a change there also that needs to occur in terms of how do we think urbanization because I think these urbanization particularly in areas that are new urban areas new growing urban areas in the middle of forests are big risks big hotspots for zoonotic diseases to happen and putting the issue of zoonotic diseases aside for a minute we're already have seen that you know wildlife hunting in many areas is is is becoming unsustainable and one of the issues is that we are having increased urban populations who are still eating well meat and they're not dependent on wild meat very often but they're eating it for for cultural reasons or for taste reasons and but but that as Natalie says those that can shift very quickly and there are there's some anecdotal evidence that the younger generations aren't looking to wild meat for for their nutrition and are starting to change their their ideas about eating wild meat quite quickly and and a number of of NGOs are now looking at how we can um sort of how how that behavior change can be helped to happen and how people in urban areas can shift their consumption of wild meat and and you know generally just that different change to different consumption patterns and that could help to reduce the pressure on on rural communities who are still very dependent on wild meat and reduce the pressure on biodiversity. Yeah I have an interesting question here on the issue of is it possible to promote wildlife farming instead of directly exploiting the resource from the wild and and that's particularly relevant in the case of China because a lot of the animals that are sold in the wet market they are not coming from the wild they are coming from farming. Who wants to have a shot on this one? Well maybe I can I can say something I was like farming for us you know certainly in our group in our research we have seen a lot of people from the outside sort of telling us that the solution to the wild meat problem is to encourage rural people or anywhere in the world to to farm the animals that are normally hunt in the forest. Our experience certainly from Latin America and from Africa is that a lot of these activities these initiatives don't really sort of produce enough meat and there are many issues to do with disease there are issues to do with how you maintain these animals properly etc. China in particular have done this for a number of species and and there are there is quite a large volume of meat that seems to be coming out of some of these wildlife farms but to do this you know at the level of tropical forest areas throughout the world from our evidence from our point of view this is not the solution the solution is much more to do with allowing rural peoples and indigenous people to hunt sustainably and to stop the demand for wild meat in urban areas because that's where the sink for animals is you know and we've said it a number of times here we're dealing with a problem that these we dissected divided into three we're dealing with the rural areas and the rural peoples that need to be allowed to hunt sustainably we need to stop the urban demand because that's where a lot of this commodity meat is coming in and being used for no reason other than the taste and we need to come up with alternatives within the provincial towns because they are still dependent on on the meat that comes out so i wouldn't say that wildlife farming is a solution but better administration of these three different sectors and another somewhat related question is looking at the besides regulation and enforcement do we not need a public education campaign especially among educated urban consumer to patronize or to change the way wildlife is consumed or i think it would be so well lauren has mentioned the fact that you know there are one or two initiatives now certainly our involvement in in central africa initiatives to to start social campaigns to change the mentality if you want other people who are consuming wild meat as a commodity things are also changing naturally you know in west africa we know that there are the younger generation are not really wanting to consume wild meat because they think this is something that only their grandfathers used to do it's a it's a backward thing to do however we in areas where there is still quite a bit of consumption of wild meat if you think of kinshasa that has over 10 million people even if two grams of wild meat was consumed by each person you do have an enormous amount of wild meat still entering these cities so social campaigns working with these communities to change the way they do things must be the way forward and then we have the one million dollar question what strategy can you propose to discourage the bushmeat consumption in region where people depend on it for food when you want to have a go at this one maybe maybe lauren no or nathalie can answer that but i i'll add my i'll add my two pennies first i i i think again it's a question of not prohibiting people in in dependent areas to to hunt i and we do not believe that that is the way forward what we can do and should do is actually work with these communities so that they can have a resource that continues into the future in other words sustainable use of a resource is what we want in these areas not banning john you need to let the ladies talk lauren and natalie because it's probably the last question you can answer sorry i do i mean i agree with john that um i think it's we we don't want to be um we don't use the same techniques for everywhere so rural communities that depend on wild meat um these are often many communities very many small communities and even if you wanted to try and change hunting practices in those communities but incredibly difficult because there's they're very small remote isolated communities spread across large areas but you know the main the main issue is that they they do completely depend on wild meat still many of them and so trying to reduce that wild meat consumption is is just not ethically right um and i i do see that we have larger problems in the consumption of wild meat in in urban areas where it isn't an issue of food security and going back to the global problem in these these areas where people do consume wild meat the the consumption of wild meat isn't the only issue it's also the destruction of the habitat that those animals live in so we at the same time is thinking of how we can regulate wild meat consumption and wild meat hunting we also i think have to think about how we can reduce reduce habitat loss natalie i think maybe as we're talking about solutions i think i just want to add the fact that land tenure is a big is a big aspect that we need to consider i i have seen in communities where they have land tenure they have the possibility to develop their own guidelines their own rules about hunting about the use of natural resources about deforestation about they they are much more resilient they are able to um sustain the use of their natural resources longer um because yeah because there is a sense of ownership and therefore local leaders have have have have a stake and are respected for the fact that they are the guarantor of of of the land and therefore the resources so i think if i can compare two different situations the examples that we are seeing now in latin america where indigenous communities have land tenure not necessarily perfect because many communities are asking for extensions of the of these lands but those communities are able to take decisions even no matter what is happening nationally or globally so they can protect certain species locally they can i think they can come up with much more clever management ideas than national regulations because they know the territories they're know they know their micro habitats they know the specific species that are that is specifically vulnerable in that particular area so and they have the knowledge of their resources so i think land tenure is one of the aspects where um the the evolution of rights and land tenure to local communities is one of the things that i think we need to be working forward to ensure sustainability at that level at the local level okay thank you very much i think we are getting close to the the end of our webinar i will just answer one question and we answer this one myself from ratchapuri who is asking do we need the more rigorous research program directed at identifying the causal chain that lead to these outbreaks so the answer is yes we need a program and can c4 develop a more rigorous program to research causes i think we are very interested and if anybody has seen the group listening to us is interested please don't hesitate to contact us this is definitely a very important question i would like to thank the attendees i would like to thank lauren natalie john and all the c4 colleagues that help in the background to run this webinar um this is over for me from bogey uh stay safe stay healthy all wash your hands and see you next time