This strikes me as a first-world privileged thing, similar to how Europe built its industrial revolution on coal but now tries to prevent others from doing the same thing. Even in the US we eat domesticated livestock (cattle), cultivated but not domesticated livestock (bison), and entirely wild animals (deer). Any of these could vector a novel illness to humans.

I'd be fine with banning consumption of wild deer, for example.

About 350,000 deer are culled in the UK each year, the population is actively managed in many places of the country for various reasons [1]. Because of this, venison is not uncommon in our supermarkets. Should we just destroy the corpses instead?

[1] https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/advice-education/why-manage...

Yes, if the risk of transmitting pandemic causing viruses to humans is as high as for bats.

Not all animal species carry the same risk. This isn't about privilege - or at least not anymore. Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved after food shortages and famines caused by e.g. the four pests and such. This is cultural. as are the unsanitary conditions at wet markets, and completely unscientific "traditional medicine" and the common notion that live beings taste better if tortured before death.

Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.

> Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved

That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.

If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".

"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB

> infecting humans and causing a global pandemic

Kinda like the swine flu?

That's why we should only consume pigs raised in captivity with no exposure to wild populations. If that's where you get your bats or pangolins from, and you actually have enforcement and verification of that, then no problem. (Except that pangolins are endangered of course.)