Do Wildlife Taboos Protect People From Zoonotic Disease? Evidence Says Maybe Not

A global taboo against eating bats and disturbing their habitats has been proposed as a way to head off the next pandemic. But a new review of traditional wildlife taboos suggests that the historical record offers surprisingly little support for the idea that such prohibitions arose to protect people from zoonotic disease—and the authors warn that manufacturing new taboos could carry serious social and ecological risks of its own.

The analysis, published as a Perspective in Frontiers in Conservation Science, was prompted by a 2023 proposal from scholars calling for humanity to leave bats alone—not out of fear, but to let them live undisturbed while they continue providing ecosystem services such as insect control and crop pollination. Those scholars argued that many taboos were originally spurred by ecological or health concerns, and that adopting a bat taboo would serve humanity. Mayla Tarango of the Smithsonian Mason School of Conservation and Jamie K. Reaser of Rain Crow Consulting set out to test that premise, asking how often zoonotic disease actually catalyzed the development and transmission of traditional wildlife taboos.

The pair conducted a systematic literature review, searching digital libraries including Google Scholar, PubMed Central, BioMed, and Web of Science for combinations of terms linking wildlife taboos to zoonotic disease, case studies, lists, and examples. The Spanish-language search returned nothing viable. From 1,577 paper titles screened in English, the team reviewed 446 abstracts and identified 54 peer-reviewed manuscripts suitable for data collection. From those papers they harvested data on 816 individual taboos, cataloging the target species, the specific prohibition, the taboo type—food, species-specific, life-history, social, segment, or religious—and the age groups, genders, social circumstances, and locations to which each applied.

The taboos spanned a wide taxonomic range, covering mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, mollusks, and crustaceans. With few exceptions, they imposed controls on food consumption, and many were oriented toward women and relevant to pregnancy. Most of the studies examined were conducted in Africa and Asia. The authors note that data quality was a persistent challenge: many articles were written from an anthropological perspective, authors sometimes lacked the knowledge or motivation to identify target species, and vague common names—sometimes in unspecified languages—made species identification difficult. Translation errors may have introduced further misunderstandings.

To probe possible links between taboos and disease, the researchers used the species, mode of contact, locality, and symptoms or conditions described by the original authors to run broad searches for peer-reviewed literature connecting each taboo to known zoonotic pathogens or parasites. They identified 134 instances in which there was a reasonable likelihood of association between a taboo and at least one zoonotic pathogen or parasite. But the authors are emphatic that these are hypothetical linkages, not evidence of zoonotic origin. In most cases the reported symptoms could be attributed to multiple zoonoses, and it was largely impossible to correlate a specific target species with a specific disease. The associations, they write, are too incomplete, broad, and tentative to warrant critical analysis.

Some of the strongest potential connections involved rat lungworm (Angiostrongylus cantonensis), a roundworm parasite that ultimately infects the brain and nervous system of rats. Snails that eat infected rats serve as intermediate hosts, and people or animals such as reptiles may then consume those infected snails raw or undercooked. Although most human infections are asymptomatic, the parasite can migrate to the brain, causing a range of neurological symptoms associated with eosinophilic meningitis. The review also turned up accounts of species protected by the belief that killing them would bring illness or death. The Otuogidi and Otuag-bagi communities, for example, prohibit killing the Gambian mongoose via taboo, holding that violators will suffer severe illness resulting in death. The authors suggest such beliefs may reflect a basic conceptualization of pathogen spillover dynamics, even if not framed in scientific terms—and that taboos not intended as disease prevention may still serve that function by preventing exposure to infectious animals.

Yet the evidence cuts both ways. Golden and Comaroff claimed that the Makira people of northeastern Madagascar avoid eating lemurs because consumption causes gastrointestinal symptoms, and lemurs are known to host gut pathogens such as Giardia and Cryptosporidium. But a recent study in Madagascar did not find lemurs positive for either parasite. Some authors reviewed explicitly state that disease threat played no role in taboo establishment, attributing taboos strictly to socioeconomic factors such as resource availability. Others take the position that disease concerns are promulgated by individuals rather than community consensus. There is one clear contemporary example: analyzing prices, quantities, and food consumption before and after an Ebola outbreak, researchers found that a wild meat taboo arose from awareness that the Ebola virus stemmed from contact with wild animals.

The authors identify several reasons why the historical record is so thin. Zoonotic disease is a contemporary scientific construct, and Indigenous and traditional peoples are unlikely to have a cosmology of illness that maps readily onto scientific terminology, hindering interpretation and documentation by researchers. Taboos may have been passed down orally, making them susceptible to the loss of cultural narratives, and wildlife ethics are often treated as private matters or static inheritances, confounding research. Even under contemporary medical practice, the link between zoonotic infection and behavior may not be apparent, because pathogens can produce mild symptoms or long lag times between infection and illness—conditions under which communities lack an impetus to change risky behavior. Information about zoonotic diseases circulating in communities is often lacking; a survey in Thailand’s Tak and Mae Hong Son provinces found that respondents with higher education had deeper understanding of zoonotic risk, while some cultural groups routinely interact with wildlife without understanding disease risks. Most authors in the reviewed literature came from social science disciplines, with relatively little engagement from the health sector.

Against this uncertain backdrop, Tarango and Reaser raise three ethical concerns about deliberately creating new taboos. First, people do not generally have the right to tell others what to consider sacred or profane, yet history is full of such impositions through colonialism, direct conflict, and systemic oppression—traumas that can shatter cultural identity and, in extreme cases, lead to cultural extinction. Scholars have raised concerns about neocolonial conservation, in which social constructs are used to manipulate people to achieve conservation aims, and about social marketing programs administered by Global North organizations to Global South communities. The authors suggest these concerns may transfer directly to what they call neocolonial One Health, in which Global North belief systems are imposed upon or marketed to Global South peoples for zoonoses risk mitigation. For Indigenous and traditional communities, bats are often more than utilitarian resources—they are tied to spiritual and cultural identity and well-being.

Second, values, ethics, and morals are context-specific and dynamic, not universal, which makes establishing a genuinely global taboo a formidable logistical challenge. Values are shaped by cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental variables, shift over time, and can be manipulated through force and coercion. A taboo would need to be temporally stable to mitigate risk effectively, yet globalization and postindustrial value complexity act as destabilizing forces. Third, there could be adverse impacts on conservation itself: cultural beliefs instilled through taboos can influence perceptions of animals and result in wildlife persecution, and fear of zoonotic outbreaks can lead to culling and habitat destruction when species are believed to be disease sources. A campaign would need to promote biophilia while discouraging contact—a tension the authors flag in discussing a proposed Love Them & Leave Them campaign concept from the International Alliance against Health Risks in the Wildlife Trade and the IUCN Commission on Education and Outreach.

The authors’ conclusion is measured. They cannot determine whether taboos were originally spurred by zoonoses concerns or whether they effectively mitigated zoonoses risks. They do, however, judge that there is a reasonable likelihood that some prohibitions—particularly on meat consumption—arose when communities repeatedly observed human illness following contact with certain wildlife species. They do not recommend contemporary taboos as risk mitigation measures. If taboo campaigns are developed anyway, they urge socio-cultural sensitivity, knowledge, and community participation, warning that efforts to prevent one type of trauma could facilitate other traumas. They recommend socio-cultural and ecological impact assessments as standard practice before any such campaign, with effectiveness reevaluated over time as community values change, and with ecosystem-wide ramifications—whether processes and functions benefit or suffer—explored in advance.

Subject of Research: Whether traditional wildlife taboos functioned as zoonotic disease risk mitigation and the ethics of creating contemporary taboos for public health

Article Title: Wildlife taboos as zoonoses risk mitigation: examining the past and proposed with considerations for human health and biodiversity conservation

Article References: Tarango, M., & Reaser, J. K. (2026). Wildlife taboos as zoonoses risk mitigation: examining the past and proposed with considerations for human health and biodiversity conservation. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 7, Article 1925663. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1925663

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1925663

Keywords: wildlife taboos, zoonotic disease, bats, pandemic prevention, conservation ethics, social marketing, Indigenous knowledge, pathogen spillover, biodiversity conservation, One Health, literature review, collective trauma