A Thai video blogger has been arrested after filming herself eating a bowl of bat soup, sparking outrage amid concerns about the risk of new pandemic viruses jumping to humans.
A stomach-churning video shared earlier this week showed Phonchanok Srisunaklua – a teacher who also runs a Youtube channel called Gin Zap Bep Nua Nua, or ‘Eat spicy and delicious’ – devouring a murky brown soup.
Floating in the liquid alongside cherry tomatoes are several Lesser Asiatic yellow bats, a protected species which she bought at a market near the Laos border in northern Thailand.
Bats infected with the closest relative to Sars-Cov-2, which sparked the Covid-19 pandemic, are found in the same region.
In the video, Phonchanok is seen tearing the flying mammals apart and dipping them in a spicy sauce, describing the meat as “delicious”. At one point she holds an entire bat up to the camera, pointing to the creature’s teeth. Moments later you hear the crunch as she nibbles on its “soft bones”.
The now-deleted footage sparked outrage. “You’ll be damned if you start a pandemic,” warned one user who commented on the video.
“You should not mess with bats,” Professor Teerawat Hemajuta, of the Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, told The Thaiger, adding that the mammals contain pathogens which could prove deadly for humans.
Researchers have estimated that as many as 400,000 people across southeast Asia and southern China are infected by coronaviruses carried by bats annually, while the flying mammals could carry up to 10,000 pathogens capable of infecting humans.
And while the moment Covid-19 jumped to humans has not been pinpointed, experts say it almost certainly originated in bats. Last year, scientists narrowed in on the virus’ closest known relative in bat caves in Laos.
Phonchanok, who lives in northern Thailand, said she bought the bats from a market near the Laos border. Many experts are concerned of the health risks associated with these sorts of wet markets, and there have been efforts to crackdown on them after the Huannan market in Wuhan was implicated in amplifying the early spread of Covid-19.
“I was shocked to see [the bat] in the clip,” said Pattaraphon Manee-on, head of the wildlife health management group at the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. “The incident should not happen both in Thailand and around the world, it is very risky behaviour, especially as bats have a lot of pathogens.”
Phonchanok, who has apologised for the culinary stunt and said she will not eat the mammals again, has been arrested for violating the Wildlife Conservation and Protection Act. She faces up to five years in prison, or a 500,000 baht (almost £12,000) fine.
But she is not alone in eating and trading bats in the region. In September, for instance, doctors urged people not to consume the creatures after a “bat hunter” selling the flying mammals for less than £3 in northwest Thailand claimed they are delicious in red curry.
