What happens when the reservoir is the family dog or a free-range pet cat? Or maybe domesticated animals are less likely to get sick in the first place?
It wasn't a reasonable position since we've known cats and dogs (and everything else) could catch it. (Among other reasons, but this is the most obvious for anyone even slightly familiar with previous vaccination efforts.)
For a virus that supposedly just jumped from wild animals to humans, it'd be irresponsible to simultaneously think it couldn't happen again from any of the number of species potentially acting as reservoirs.
How we treat these animals is a blessing compared to how Mother Nature would treat them. We protect them from parasites, bacterial infections, malnutrition, rabies, predators, the weather, physical injuries and yes, ingesting things they’re not supposed to.
Yes, but last I heard the population was not considered healthy either (something about a facial cancer that can be passed from animal to animal)...so give is a few months and the statement might be correct.
while immune systems in domestic and wild animals can vary, my point was that the source of infection was more likely human caretakers. Chances of a wild mink catching covid from an infected human are probably lower than getting hit by lighting 10 times in a row
Even if the virus is transferable between species, pets aren’t a particularly worrying vector. Most pets only have contact with a few humans, and those humans usually already have contact with each other.
Places like kennels and dog parks can increase the pet to pet transmission, but if a city locks down then those opportunities decrease as well. So worrying about pets won’t change any of our current approaches.
Are you sure COVID has never been documented in animals? I seem to remember reading about cases where entire farm populations of minks were being killed. Perhaps you mean infection from an animal host to human?
I am not a veterinarian but there are things you can do, and that is being done (for swine flu for example), to prevent disease outbreaks in animals, also within wildlife. Primarily surveillance and control.
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