Phonchanok Srisunaklua, a Thai YouTuber and food blogger, was arrested and sent to jail for five years after recording a video of herself eating a whole bat in a bowl of soup.
Srisunaklua uploaded the stomach-churning one-minute 40-second clip on her YouTube channel.
However, she started receiving backlash from netizens just as the video went viral.
Describing her soup, she says that the bats are ‘delicious’ and compared them to “eating raw meat.”
Later in the video, she then starts ripping the animal apart and dipping them in a spicy sauce called Nim Jam before eating.
At one point the footage shows her holding up a whole bat to the camera and declaring ‘it has teeth’ before beginning to crunch on the bones and saying “the bones are soft.”
However, netizens were alarmed and reported the video as soon as it went viral. Several people said that she could start another pandemic. Several experts claim that bats carry over 10,000 viruses that could be transmitted to humans and start another pandemic.
Phonchanok Srisunaklua, who is a teacher in Thailand, has nearly 400,000 subscribers on social media.
Meanwhile, the fodd blogger will face a prison time of five years along with a fine of 500,000 baht.
She is being charged with possession of protected wildlife carcasses and for crimes violating the Computer Crimes Act in Sakhon Nakhon province, Thailand.
