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. 2021 Feb:193:110439.
doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2020.110439. Epub 2020 Nov 7.

Online trade in wildlife and the lack of response to COVID-19

Thais Q Morcatty  1 , Kim Feddema  2 , K A I Nekaris  3 , Vincent Nijman  4
Affiliations

Online trade in wildlife and the lack of response to COVID-19

Thais Q Morcatty et al. Environ Res. 2021 Feb.

Abstract

Wildlife trade has been widely discussed as a likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains unclear how the main actors in the wildlife trade chain responded to these discussions and to the campaigns advocating wildlife trade bans. We analyzed the content of ~20,000 posts on 41 Facebook groups devoted to wild pet trade and ran a breakpoint and a content analysis to assess when and how the COVID-19 pandemic was incorporated into the discourse within trade communities. Only 0.44% of advertisements mentioned COVID-19, mostly after WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. No traders discussed the role of trade in spreading diseases; instead, posts stimulated the trade in wild species during lockdown. COVID-19 potentially offers persuasive arguments for reducing wildlife trade and consumption. This effect was not demonstrated by on-the-ground actors involved in this market. Bans in wildlife trade will not be sufficient and additional strategies are clearly needed.

Keywords: Behavior change; COVID-19; Online trade; Pet trade; Wildlife trade ban.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Accumulated number of posts with COVID-19-related content on Facebook groups focused on wildlife trade in Indonesia and Brazil, with the respective important landmarks, i.e. first confirmed case and decreed lockdown in each country and WHO classifying COVID-19 as pandemic.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Heat map showing the greatest overlap between the concepts recommend, services, delivery services, transport and time, and the most prominent themes: Sales (red), followed by COVID-19 (orange) and Lockdown (yellow). The warmer the colors (i.e. the closer to red tones) the more salient the theme is within the data. The size of the circle does not indicate importance. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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