The raccoon dog, is a dog that looks very similar to raccoons, and that lives in China, the Korean peninsula and Japan and that since the 1940s has grown in commercialization, especially of its skin, proliferating in exotic markets. Today a study is syndicating him as the culprit of the passage of COVID-19 from animals to humans.
“There is no way of knowing for sure because the animals sold on the market were never tested. But samples taken from the cages and carts used to house and transport the raccoon dogs at the seafood market in Huanan, China, in late 2019, contained traces of the virus,” said Chris Newman, a biologist, ecologist and research associate at the University of Oxford, and co-author of the article, according to USAToday.
“As far as virologists are concerned, looking at the evolutionary strain of the virus itself, it’s perfectly reasonable that it (SARS-CoV-2) evolved in a bat and then spread via the raccoon dog as the primary intermediary”, added the scientist.
The animals are “slaughtered to order and not in a particularly nice way”Newman said, according to USAToday. On fur farms, raccoon dogs and foxes are skinned alive or electrocuted; in the markets, the seller cuts them up with a knifeproviding what consumers would consider the freshest meat possible.
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