This photo taken on February 8, 2020 shows a vendor selling bats at the Tomohon Extreme Meat market on Sulawesi island, as business is booming and curious tourists keep arriving to check out exotic fare that enrages animal rights activists. Picture: AFP.
The previously uncompromising bazaar is the first such market in the country to finally back down and stop the trade of cat and dog meat, animal rights group Humane Society International said in a statement Friday.It called the ban a “historic agreement that will spare thousands of animals from being bludgeoned and blowtorched to death for human consumption.
Those calls ramped up after the first cluster of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020 was linked to a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, stoking fears elsewhere that viruses were jumping from animals to humans.