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Wiebers & Feigin (W&F) are right that what COVID-19 is telling us is that to prevent future zoonotic pandemics we need to put an end to our exploitation of wild and farmed animals. To implement W&F’s recommendations we need to overcome at least three obstacles: (1) the way we have responded historically to zoonoses, (2) our insatiable appetite for meat (wild or farmed) and (3) our speciesist attitude toward nonhuman animals. James Marcum is professor of philosophy at Baylor University. His research interests include animal rights and food ethics. Website Wiebers & Feigin (2020) (W&F) raise very powerful and profound questions about what the COVID-19 pandemic is telling us: What is our role, not just in the present zoonotic pandemic but also in past pandemics? And what must we do to avoid future zoonotic pandemics? W&F’s answer is that we are responsible for the rise in zoonotic pandemics, including COVID-19, because of our exploitation of wild and farmed animals: “The trade and consumption of wild animals in live-animal markets should be banned in all countries. Intensive confinement of animals in factory farm operations should be discontinued worldwide for the sake of animals, humans, and the environment, and we should rapidly evolve to eating other forms of protein that are safer for humans.” I certainly agree with W&F about what needs to be done to avoid future zoonotic pandemics. I have concerns not so much about implementability (although that will certainly be a challenge, given animal agriculture’s ability to conceal its mistreatment of animals; Pitts 2012) but about whether, once we have heard what COVID-19 is telling us, and the pandemic ends, we will act -or simply forget what we have heard and persist in our pre-COVID-19 behavior of exploiting animals. Can we handle the truth of what COVID-19 is telling us? There are at least three obstacles to surmount: 1. History. The first obstacle to surmount is suggested by the history of pandemics to date, especially since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Within that timeframe, the number of zoonotic outbreaks and epidemics has increased to such an extent that we now live in an “era of pandemics” (Morens et al. 2020). The Ebola virus initially emerged from a bat reservoir in 1976 and then erupted into an epidemic in 2014 (Breman et al. 2016). Since the appearance of HIV in 1981 through hunting and eating chimpanzees, millions of people have died from AIDS (Sharp and Hahn 2011). Other significant zoonotic outbreaks and epidemics include the 2002 SARS coronavirus epidemic, the 2009 H1N1 virus