BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:People regularly contract diseases from rodents, including (but not limited to) hantavirus, tularemia, leptospirosis, monkeypox, and Lassa fever.I must admit I never heard of those things.
BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:FYI, bats are not rodents.I know that. My argument was if the contacts between rodents and humans are to be controlled for the sake of disease control, then the same goes even more for contacts between bats and humans. Rodents have caused zero pandemics in recent history, bats have caused three.
Bats, as far as I understand it, have a very different immune system from other mammals, because of having a very fast metabolism. In most mammals, the immune system is focused on eliminating the viruses from the body. In bats, the immune system is focused on making the virus coexist harmlessly with the body. Thus, the viruses can evolve in bats to be much more deadly and contagious than they can in other mammals, because strains that would immediately kill other mammals can spread between bats. It's like leaky vaccines such as for Marek's disease lead to more deadly and contagious strains: bat immune system acts as if it was vaccinated with a leaky vaccine. That's why many pandemics start with bats.
BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:How many would die from rodent-borne diseases if it weren’t for cats?And cats help against rodent-borne diseases... how exactly? If a cat eats an infected rodent, it becomes infected itself, right?
BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:We deliberately kill billions of birds and mammals every year for food and and for industrial raw materials, and have caused the extinction of thousands of species through the expansion of our own.Yet no human being is as blood-thirsty as a cat is. No human being would, if they sees a mouse, run after it and tear it apart using their teeth. And almost every cat would do that if it sees a mouse.
