Driving a Hummer to take the dog to get groomed is a first world type of environmental idocy, but the western world has no monopoly.
In east and southeast asia people seem willing if not eager to eat anything that moves. Two recent cases of avian flu in humans were reported in Vietnamese men who drank raw blood of a duck. (With all the news about this, couldn't they have at least cooked it?)
And in today's news from the New York Times
September 30, 2005
2 Teams Identify Chinese Bat as SARS Virus Hiding Place
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The SARS virus, which has killed 774 people worldwide, has long been known to come from an animal. Now two scientific teams have independently identified the Chinese horseshoe bat as that animal and as a hiding place for the virus in nature.
The bats apparently are healthy carriers of SARS, which caused severe economic losses, particularly in Asia, as it spread to Canada and other countries. In Asia, many people eat bats or use bat feces in traditional medicine for asthma, kidney ailments and general malaise.
Some of the earlier cases of SARS in people were traced to people exposed to some odd animal (a civet something) that had been brought live, in a cage, to a Chinese market. People, birds, reptiles, and wild mammals seem to have a huge opportunity to exchange germs in these places. I don't want to be a western world chauvanist, but our way of producing meat seems reassuring by comparison. Cattle, pigs, and chickens never get near another species except a few humans. The animals are raised in large enough groups that if there's a contagious disease, a few individuals will show up sick with it. If things get done right, the whole herd or flock gets quarantined, and if needed, tainted meat can usually be retrieved from the food distribution system before people eat it. The meat that's eaten isn't quite as fresh -- it has been refrigerated a few days or frozen, but I think its safer.