The mention of fur farming can evoke some pretty strong reactions from some people, but this industry largely flies under the radar most of the time. The industry itself is dying out in much of the world, as people turn away from raising animals solely for their coats, but large numbers of animals are still
As a journal associate editor and reviewer, I’ve seen lots of papers about SARS-CoV-2 in animals. Some have been great, ground breaking papers. Many have been small, weak studies rushed out to be “first,” with inadequate depth and lacking critical assessment. Some have been a complete disaster. The latter two groups are a concern beyond
The ongoing H5N1 avian influenza outbreak is an unprecedented event in its size, scope and duration (but it’s not getting much press anymore these days). As infections continue to occur is birds in large numbers over a vast geographic range, we worry about spillover events into other species.
There have now been many reports of
I’ve done countless presentations and interviews about COVID-19 and animals, and the question of whether pets can infect people always comes up.
My general line has been “We know that human-to-pet infection with SARS-CoV-2 is pretty common. My main concern is cats, since we know they can spread the virus cat-to-cat. If they can
Headline writers are probably going to screw up my day tomorrow by sensationalizing this, but a new paper in the journal Animals (Fiorito et al. 2022) describes SARS-CoV-2 infection in cattle in Italy. (It’s an MDPI journal, and I take anything published there with a big grain of salt given their low standards, but this
While we’ve learned a lot about the susceptibility of many different animal species to SARS-CoV-2, horses have been a bit of an unknown. We’ve had concerns about potential susceptibility based on the nature of the receptor the virus uses to enter host cells, but study in horses has still been limited. A lot of that
As the world tries to (prematurely) transition back to some semblance of normalcy (or at least what used to be “normal”), it’s a challenge to figure out what changes to make, and when. There will never be agreement between everybody. Some want full reversion to “normal” now, some want third-wave-level restrictions until further notice… like
Concerns about the animal aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to come in waves. Most of the time they are ignored or dismissed, but there are also periodic flurries of attention and (often over-) reaction. Lately, questions about vaccination of animals against SARS-CoV-2 follow have been on the rise.
Should domestic and wild animals be
One thing we’ve been watching for with SARS-CoV-2 in animals is whether we will see establishment of “animal” variants. Humans have done an effective job of infecting a wide variety of animal species with this primarily-human virus. Fortunately, thus far these infections usually die out rapidly in that animal or group of animals (mink being
Throughout the pandemic, countless decisions have had to be made, often with limited data. As more information becomes available, guidance and recommendation are updated. That sometimes upsets people, but it’s a good thing because it means we know more. If no recommendations had changed since early 2020, it would mean that we were really intuitive
