LIVE Bats, Cats, Dogs, Monkeys Sold in Indonesian Market

A dead bat — Would you eat a dead bat? Or a dog? Photo by Sardaka under CC BY-SA 4.0

Everyone now knows where COVID-19 started : the wet market in Wuhan, China. This place sells wild animals. The virus travelled from animal to human. Well, on February 5th, 2020, SCMP (the South China Morning Post) reported that “bats, snakes, dogs, monkeys and other ‘delicacies’ are still being sold every day at the Tomohon Extreme Market in North Sulawesi, Indonesia [~2,200 km northeast of Jakarta]”.

“Bats, snakes, dogs, monkeys and other ‘delicacies’ are still being sold every day at the Tomohon Extreme Market in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, despite warnings from experts that doing so could make it a breeding ground for the virus”, explains journalist Amy Chew.

“Some local residents eat these bats every day, some eat them once a week,” said Royke Rarumangkay, a North Sulawesi-based journalist for CNN Indonesia.

The locals in Indonesia frequently eat bats, monkeys and snakes. According to the article, “people who frequently ate Yaki [crested macaque] monkeys often developed tuberculosis and hepatitis.”

Click here to read the full article.

Luc Mercer

Luc Mercer is a pseudonym, used for professional reasons. The journalist behind it spent more than thirty years in daily news at a major national news organization, with international assignments early in his career. He is now retired. News of the New World is his record of events that are documented, verifiable, and largely absent from the news cycles he spent three decades watching. He writes what happened, who was responsible, and what the primary sources say — nothing else. More in the About page and the Editorial Standards.