Suriyan Wanpakwaen holds a baby bamboo rat at his breeding facility in Nakhon Ratchasima Credit Mailee Osten-Tan Sarah Newey Global Health Security Correspondent.

Nuttakarn Sumon in Nakhon Ratchasima 8:00am BST We hear the bamboo rats before we see them. At the bottom of almost 200 concrete containers are hundreds of chunky rodents – some squealing as they scurry in circles, others loudly gnawing corn, sugar cane and bamboo with their sharp protruding teeth.

“They’re very easy to keep,” says Suriyan Wanpakwaen, as he peers into one of the pits at the DIY breeding facility beside his home in Nakhon Ratchasima, a province roughly 150 miles northeast of Bangkok. “My favourite thing is how clean they are, there are no bad smells.”For almost seven years, Mr Suriyan has been farming bamboo rats – and now, the business is booming. A single rodent can sell for as much as 4,000 baht (roughly £90), and there’s so much demand that Mr Suriyan and his wife can’t keep up.

They’re not the only ones cashing in. Since the coronavirus pandemic, backyard wildlife farms like this have proliferated across Southeast Asia.

While this industry long existed in the region, the mounting new additions are filling a vacuum created when, in the wake of Covid-19, China closed thousands of similar farms over bio-security concerns.

“There was obviously a void and therefore an opportunity,” said Dr Ross McEwing, a project officer focused on the illegal wildlife trade and emerging zoonotic diseases at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Bangkok.

“There was a coordinated effort to set up these wildlife farms, led by people who could consolidate stock and move that stock illegally across multiple international borders,” he added.

Bussaba Thima kisses a bamboo rat at her farm in Nakhon Ratchasima The bamboo rat trade in particular “is exploding” in Thailand and Laos, as people capitalise on a low investment farming opportunity with a high financial return.

Demand is driven both by a growing exotic pet market and the consumption of bamboo rat meat in nearby countries, experts told The Telegraph, and is facilitated by thriving social media groups.

But there are growing fears that the trade could also spawn a new pathogen, which could have consequences well beyond Southeast Asia.

Three elements in particular have raised biosecurity fears: a regulatory vacuum means there’s very little disease monitoring in these farms, where hygiene conditions vary widely; while thousands and thousands of animals are being illegally smuggled across international borders every year, bypassing customs and the usual health checks.

But perhaps most worrying of all, the farms are densely stocked. This means that if a pathogen enters the farm from, say, rodent or bat droppings, it would have ample opportunity to evolve and mutate, bouncing constantly between the densely packed animals and their human hosts. It is for exactly this reason that most mink farms have now closed in Europe“There’s a big gap in monitoring and regulations as bamboo rats aren’t considered endangered, and many of the farmers have limited training or knowledge about biosecurity,” said Sorawit Amatavete, a Bangkok-based researcher.

He added that there are probably now hundreds of bamboo rat farms across Thailand and many also farm civets – the animal linked to the origins of the 2002/3 SARS outbreak.

“From a disease perspective, the risks are really growing as the industry shifts from China to Thailand and Laos,” he said.

A female bamboo rat feeds her babies inside a concrete tube at the farm The move started during the coronavirus pandemic, when China cracked down on aspects of its domestic wildlife trade Although Beijing has consistently sought to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow imported into China, the earliest known cases have been traced to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.

That market, in turn, was supplied with live animals from small backyard farms across the vast country. Researchers have shown that bamboo rats were among the animals traded, alongside other species known to be susceptible to respiratory viruses like raccoon dogs, civets and porcupines.

Although the origins of Covid remain disputed, the wildlife trade and wet markets have been implicated in past outbreaks and are an internationally recognised bio-security concern.

Stressed animals held in cramped conditions, with living and dead wildlife in close quarters, provide an ideal environment for pathogens to spread, adapt, or recombine – and potentially jump to humans, experts have warned.

For example, the SARS epidemic in 2002/3 – which resulted in more than 700 deaths and 8,000 cases in 29 countries – was traced to civets sold in a Chinese wet market.

But Beijing moved to “thoroughly ban” the farming or trading of wildlife for human consumption in February 2020, as Covid-19 exploded around the world. Although some remain, the policy has had a considerable impact.

Bamboo rats housed together in concrete tubes“When the [Chinese] government shut it down, many of us were totally surprised – we didn’t expect they would do it… in the past, the government wholeheartedly supported wildlife breeding,” said Dr Peter Li, an associate professor of East Asian Politics and Animal Policy at the University of Houston-Downtown, and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

“But since 2020, there’s been a drastic reduction in the sales,” he added. “The public display of wildlife meat has mostly gone – you still see a small number of restaurants breaking the laws, but the largest scale operations have shut down.”But while Dr Li and others applaud Beijing’s actions they note that the trade has not died off, but has been displaced into parts of Southeast Asia. Dr Li now wants those countries to follow China’s example and ban the farms springing up across Thailand and Laos.

But others warn this could push the trade underground, making it harder to introduce disease surveillance mechanisms and hurting people’s livelihoods. A better solution, said Mr Sorawit, is to properly regulate the farms – otherwise, the industry will again emerge somewhere else. Similar debates have played out over informal livestock and game-meat trades elsewhere, including Europe.

Mr Suriyan’s backyard operation began almost by accident. Some seven years ago – as he tried to buy one of the animals as a pet – he realised there was a gap in the market.

“I called every farm and the answer was always the same: wait a few months,” said the 53-year-old. “Then I called one farm and he said he could actually help me buy enough for a whole farm. So I just bought it all!”Suddenly, Mr Suriyan and his wife, Bussaba Thima, had 100 rodents. They constructed the facility beside their two-storey house and started to breed the animals – each pair of bamboo rats deliver a new litter of pups twice a year.

Old cages used to transport bamboo rats accumulated outside Suriyan Wanpakwaen’s farm Still, it took some time to figure out their business plan. Baby bamboo rats could easily be sold as pets“exotic” animals like this are becoming more and more popular in Thailand, where social media is facilitating a flourishing and controversial market. But if the rodents went unsold during that window, they became harder to sell as adults. Then, Mr Suriyan was approached by people wanting to buy them to eat.

“Each month, they now want more than we can supply. They want 25 today, 25 tomorrow – we just don’t breed enough to meet the demand, we’re not equipped,” he said. “The price is also lower than selling to the pet market, so we sell as pets first.”While some of the bamboo rats sold for consumption remain in Thailand – Mr Suriyan sells to Chinese restaurants where the meat is a delicacy – most are now transported live out of the country and sold internationally.

The biggest market seems to be Vietnam, where bamboo rats are killed, butchered and eaten, said UNODC’s Dr McEwing. Meanwhile in Myanmar, frozen meat is in high demand.

The concrete containers housing the farm’s bamboo rats“If you move animals between countries, you need formal paperwork to show the biosecurity regulations have been met,” added Dr McEwing. “That’s what’s being bypassed, that’s what makes this illegal. It’s a transnational organised crime that flouts laws, corrupts officials, and increases the potential for zoonotic disease spillover.”The risk is not hypothetical: in a paper published in 2020 in PLOS One journal scientists found 6.3 per cent of bamboo rats farmed for food in southern Vietnam carried coronaviruses.

Meanwhile, a separate 2025 study in the same journal found 26.7 per cent of 210 people farming wild animals including bamboo rats, bats, civets and wild boar in Vietnam had antibodies for hepatitis E, and 8.7 per cent had hantavirus antibodies. Both pathogens are linked to exposure to wildlife.

Although Mr Suriyan said he has introduced hygiene and infection control measures, many farmers have little knowledge or awareness of the disease risks.

“[In Thailand] we’ve heard of disease outbreaks that wiped out entire farmstock, as there are no quarantine considerations and the hygiene or farm design was nowhere near [normal] livestock standards,” said Dr McEwing.

“Nothing gets wasted in those farms: if an animal dies, it goes into the freezer and gets repurposed as feed or is sold to a different consumption market.”He added that, in photos collated by UNODC from Facebook, hundreds of bamboo rats can be seen tightly stacked in cages as they’re transported in the boots of trucks. If one animal is sick, the pathogen rapidly infects them all – and could also jump to people handling them.

“There are hundreds of thousands of [disease] transmissions from animals to humans every year,” said Dr McEwing. “It’s highly likely that something novel will emerge that becomes an epidemic or a pandemic.”But Thai farmers are operating in a grey area, said Dr Parntep Ratanakorn, a technical advisor for the Monitoring and Surveillance Centre for Zoonotic Diseases in Wildlife and Exotic Animals (MoZWE) at Mahidol University.

The farms are not overseen by the Department of Livestock because bamboo rats are not deemed a farm animal, he said. But they are also not listed as endangered species under the international CITES treaty, meaning the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation doesn’t monitor them either.

“It’s not mandatory to, because [bamboo rats] are not a protected animal,” Dr Parntep said. “So we don’t have official numbers of how many there are.

“From a ‘One Health’ perspective, you have to bring everything together – educate [the farmers], warn them about disease risks, and monitor their facilities. But this is still an income for the poor people, and is important for their wellbeing and livelihood. The question is: how can we make it clean?”Suriyan Wanpakwaen intends to expand his bamboo rat farm operation But he added that it’s not just bamboo rats farmed to eat that pose a concern. As Thailand’s exotic pet trade booms, Dr Parntep says health workers should ask which pets someone presenting with an illness has, especially if the symptoms are respiratory.

“For the human side, we have to be aware of the potential diseases that animals can get and pass to us,” he said. “Exotic pets are in trend at the moment, but sometimes doctors forget to ask about this kind of thing.”Back in Nakhon Ratchasima, Mr Suriyan and Mrs Bussaba have big plans. With business booming, they now hold about 400 bamboo rats here at any one time and are eying further growth.

“I have a plan to expand into the plot behind the house,” he said, as he showed The Telegraph the lush space, full of bamboo plants.

“I want to build a facility which is almost like a condo, with different layers. The plan is to expand the farm to house at least 1,000 bamboo rats.”Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security