Animals and us

Please note that the relationship between animals and humans is not a parallel relationship.

I always think that there is a subtle relationship between animals and people. It has both personality and personality. The most similar characteristic between the two is that when facing each other, they can only realize the terror of the other but not their own cruelty. For example, when you face a tiger, of course what you think of is that the tiger can eat people and will die miserably if caught by it... Because after all, this is a fact that has happened. Human beings are very good at "eating people." Gain wisdom." But the tiger does not always suffer. It has also had the experience of being hunted and had nightmares about guns. Maybe at that time, it was also scared to death of you.

The idiom "dressed as an animal" shows how ferocious people imagine animals to be. In fact, animals are also very innocent. It's just their nature to pounce and bite. The "scary" faces that people are afraid of are innate. They don't think there's anything bad about them. As people say, a face that is "more beautiful than Pan'an" may look more like an evil ghost coming to seek life in the eyes of animals. I think there must be such a term in the dictionary of animals to describe the evil ones among them: fur humans.

Speaking of brutality and horror, this may only be truly reflected among its kind. It is natural for a tiger to eat a rabbit; the winner is the king and the loser is the bandit. This is the natural law. In the animal world, no one can escape the fate of the weak and the strong. Survival is everything. Therefore, the killing of the strong and the resistance of the weak are understandable. But people are a bit strange. They never launch an offensive on the surface like animals, but use endless meticulous thoughts to intrigue, fight openly and covertly, set up various traps, and wait for the enemy to take the bait with a secret smile. In this way, humans are not as fair and aboveboard as the animal world. After all, all people are of the same race, and we are all called "human beings". But this group of people only care about their own compatriots. When they are evenly matched, they are truly terrifying. This is very similar to animals. If two tigers fight, one of them will be injured! After all, humans are still monkeys, born with the nature of animals. A country is easy to change.

I often see someone complaining in the pet column of a newspaper, saying that the animals he raises are "inhumane". The so-called experts always analyze why animals should not only be given material satisfaction, but also spiritual food...

I usually read articles like this with a joke expression. I don’t think animals can “happily share the earth” with people. The lack of "human" feelings of animals is completely understandable. Maybe it's because humans have evolved too intelligently and lost the ability to communicate with primitive people. It’s no wonder that it’s hard for people to understand each other. Isn’t the generation gap often talked about? Who knows the true psychology of animals? Those cats and dogs who live with people all day long, and whose eyes and ears are affected, have learned a little bit about "hiding deeply," right? Furthermore, even if animals show emotions on their faces, how many people can see it? If a cat smiles at you, would you mistake it for yawning? It’s just a grin anyway. Some people would say, aren’t animals’ emotions expressed through body language? In fact, this is not a rule. How many times have you danced when you were happy but your face remained motionless?

People don’t like to be alone, at least most of them do. The same goes for animals, many live in groups. If you keep a dog at home and you kill fish and chickens in front of it, will it be afraid? Just imagine, how would you feel if you were raised in a lion's den and those lice disemboweled the prey in front of you? Therefore, what is lacking between humans and animals is emotional and psychological communication.

Do you like animals? Only if you respect it and understand it can you be called a friend.

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History of disease in animals and humans

Plague: Appearance time in the 6th century AD

●Place of occurrence|Egypt or Ethiopia during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great, so it was called the "Justinian Plague". It almost All over the world. Later known as the "Black Death".

●Transmitting animals|rats. Transmitted by fleas from rats to humans.

Mortality rate 30%~100%

There have been three worldwide plague pandemics recorded in history. The first one occurred almost all over the world, with nearly 100,000 people in Florence, Italy. People lost their lives.

The second time occurred in the 14th century and spread throughout Europe, Asia and northern Africa. The third time occurred in 1894 and spread to 32 countries in 1900. Smaller epidemics continue to occur around the world since 1940.

Cholera: Appearance time in the 18th century

●Place of emergence|Start from India. However, the spread was mainly limited to the Ganges Delta region of India. Due to transportation restrictions at the time, India was isolated from other countries in the world. The spread of cholera was very slow. Medical historians described it as "cholera traveling on a camel." After the East India Company became the British government's agency in India in the mid-19th century, the development of world economic trade with India opened the historic cholera blockade. It was long regarded as the most feared disease besides the plague.

●Spread animals|chickens. The earliest known chicken plague, chicken cholera, was later transmitted from chickens to humans.

Mortality rate 30% to 100%

Anthrax: Appeared in the 19th century

●Occurrence place | Mostly occurs in agricultural and animal husbandry areas, including Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Human infection with anthrax is mainly caused by occupational contact with sick animals or contaminated products.

●Transmitting animals | Cattle, sheep, camels, mules and other herbivorous animals. People who have frequent contact with livestock, such as herdsmen, veterinarians, and meat and fur processing workers, often suffer from cutaneous anthrax, also known as industrial anthrax. It is an ulcer that is painless but very difficult to heal. Intestinal, pulmonary, septicaemic and meningeal anthrax are all dangerous and have rapid onset, and patients can die within 2 to 4 days.

Mortality rate 20%

Ebola virus: Appeared in 1976

●Place of emergence | Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa, the name comes from A river in Congo. Since then, this mysterious virus has appeared in Gabon, Sudan, Ivory Coast, and even the United Kingdom.

●Transmitting animal | Not yet identified, suspected to be rodents. Recently, there has been another large-scale outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the northwest region of Congo on the border with Gabon. According to the latest news, more than 100 people have died from Ebola virus. According to information announced to the media by the Congolese Health Minister, the cause of the Ebola virus outbreak was that local residents ate primates that died in nearby forests.

●Symptoms|The symptoms of Ebola virus are very scary. The infected person will have a high fever and severe muscle pain. The heart, liver, internal organs and other internal organs in the body will begin to erode into semi-liquid blocks. Finally, the patient's eyes, mouth, nose and anus will bleed profusely, and the pores of the skin all over the body will be soaked with dirty blood and die. Ebola virus is easily transmitted through the blood, semen, urine and sweat of patients. The general incubation period is three weeks, and the mortality rate of infected people can be as high as 80%. The symptoms in the early stages of the disease are very confusing and can easily be mistaken by doctors for a common fever or measles.

Mortality rate 50% to 90%

The first outbreak of the Ebola virus showed huge lethality, claiming 270 lives, but no one knew what happened at the time What kind of virus is it. The second major outbreak of Ebola occurred in 1995, killing 245 people. In the more than 20 years since Ebola was discovered, approximately 10,000 people have died from this terrible virus around the world. In fact, since this virus mostly occurs in remote areas of Africa, the actual number of deaths may be much higher than this number.

HIV: Time of emergence in October 1980

●Place of emergence|The UCLA Hospital in the United States admitted 5 cases of young gay men, and these cases were later confirmed to be one A disease that has never been seen before - "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS).

●Transmission of animals | Still not very clear. Researchers have likely found the natural host of the virus, or at least one of the hosts - green monkeys, or African monkeys, living in Africa. The traditional view is that people with AIDS become sick by eating the meat of animals such as monkeys or orangutans that contain HIV. However, the flaw of this theory is that AIDS is transmitted through blood and body fluids, and the dietary route is not accurate. Later it was speculated that due to Africa's hot climate and humid living environment, it is difficult for the living habits of all African nations to integrate with "civilized society", and various infectious diseases affecting humans and animals are spreading rapidly and stubbornly in the region. .

On the other hand, in many places, especially in rural tribes, sex is very casual. Residents in some areas also have a custom passed down from generation to generation: using monkey blood to stimulate people's sexual desire. They injected the blood of male and female monkeys into the thighs or pubic areas and backs of hands and arms of men and women respectively. They even used this method of injecting monkey blood into the human body to treat women's infertility and male impotence. However, if we trace this custom in the area, the earliest date may be much longer than the history of the AIDS epidemic, making this view questionable. The latest research by three German biochemists in 1999 concluded that a large number of wild monkeys or orangutans are indeed infected with HIV, but they do not become ill themselves. When they are hunted and sold, blood-sucking stable flies can infect them with HIV. The virus is transferred into the human body and causes disease. Another possibility is that the blood-sucking fly bites an AIDS-affected monkey and then bites a human to spread the disease.

Mortality rate 61%

There have been at least 36 million cases so far.

Mad cow disease: Appeared in 1985

●Occurrence place | In April 1985, the first case appeared in the United Kingdom. In the past 10 years, the disease has spread rapidly, affecting other countries around the world. Such as France, Ireland, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland, Oman and Germany, etc. According to the investigation, it was found that some of these countries were caused by the import of British beef. On September 22, 2001, Japan confirmed Asia's first case of mad cow disease. Then the first case was discovered in the United States, and the world was once plunged into a mad cow disease panic.

●Communication animals | cattle. Except for the special circumstances of direct contact with the central nervous system of cattle (including surgical instruments and other medical supplies), human blood and digestive tract are the main infection routes of mad cow virus.

The mortality rate is 100%

So far, at least 125 people have died from this disease. Because there is no cure, the medical community has not been able to find the root cause of the disease. The mortality rate Almost 100%.

Hendra virus: time of emergence in September 1994

●Occurrence place | In the town of Hendra on the outskirts of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland Province on the east coast of Australia. An illness that causes acute respiratory syndrome in racehorses, a disease typically characterized by severe breathing difficulties and high mortality, has occurred at a racecourse and has also manifested as human-to-human contact infection. 14 racehorses and one person died. After the pathogen was isolated and identified, it was proven to be a member of the Paramyxoviridae family and was initially named equine morbillivirus and later Hendra virus.

●Communication animals | flying foxes. After the emergence of Hendra virus, more than 5,000 domestic animals were tested for antibodies locally, and no antibodies against Hendra virus were found. Later, the target of the investigation shifted to wild animals that can move between affected areas, and it was found that four types of flying foxes, including the black flying fox, gray-headed flying fox, little red flying fox, and eye-ring flying fox, have antibodies against Hendra virus. . Later, Hendra virus was isolated from the reproductive tract of a pregnant gray-headed flying fox. Serological testing of 1,043 flying fox samples from Queensland found that 47% were positive for Hendra virus. Antibody monitoring found that the antibody levels in flying foxes are consistent with the local epidemic of the disease, indicating that flying foxes are in a subclinical state of infection. Although direct transmission of the virus from flying foxes to horses has not been found, laboratory infections confirm that this is possible. The most likely route of transmission is that horses eat pasture contaminated by fetal tissue or fetal fluid of flying foxes carrying the virus. In Queensland, the onset of disease in horses coincides with the breeding season of fruit bats, and the isolation of Hendra virus from fetal tissue of laboratory-infected and naturally infected flying foxes further supports this speculation. Secondly, horses infected by eating leftover fruits eaten by flying foxes are also one of the causes of the disease. The virus is spread among horses through infected urine or nasal secretions, and humans are infected through contact with sick horses.

Mortality rate 30% to 60%

Hanjiang virus: appeared in 1993

●Place of emergence | United States. In May of that year, a young American was admitted to a hospital in New Mexico due to chronic respiratory disease. Just a few days before he was hospitalized, he seemed to have caught a cold. However, after being hospitalized, his symptoms suddenly changed and became less and less like a cold. His lungs began to bleed and breathing became more and more difficult. A few hours later, the patient die. After investigation, it was found that the fiancée of the deceased contracted the same infectious disease and died suddenly five days ago.

Soon, similar deaths were reported in Colorado, Utah and Arizona, which border New Mexico.

●Transmitting animals|rats. The researchers set up mouse traps around the deceased's house and captured many Bosch mice. According to laboratory analysis, 1/3 of the mice carried the virus. When patients clean their rooms in the spring, rodent feces will float into the air along with the dust, and the viruses in them will enter the human body.

Mortality rate 38%

Avian Flu: Appeared in 1997

●Place of occurrence | This disease first occurred in Italy in 1878 and was later called " The bird flu (H5N5) that caused the most economic losses occurred in Binzhou and other areas of the United States in 1983. The U.S. government spent more than 60 million U.S. dollars on this epidemic, and the indirect economic losses were estimated at 349 million U.S. dollars. During these outbreaks, only poultry died. In the 1997 bird flu outbreak in Asia and other places, people were infected and died. Scientists found that there were already channels for the virus to spread from chickens to humans.

●Transmission animals | chickens, ducks, pigeons, etc.

Mortality rate 33.3%

At least 18 people were infected

Nipah virus: emergence time 1998.9-1999.4

●Occurrence place | First outbreak in Malaysia. First, there was a large-scale outbreak among pigs, and then it spread to humans. The patients were all pig farm or slaughterhouse workers. The cerebrospinal fluid of the deceased patient was examined, and RT-PCR confirmed that it was a virus similar to Hendra virus, but clinically and epidemiologically different from Hendra virus. It was considered to be a new virus, named Nipah virus.

●Communication animals | flying foxes. Since Nipah virus is closely related to Hendra virus, bats have become prime targets for surveillance. Malaysia has a diverse range of bat species, including at least 13 species of fruit-eating bats and more than 60 species of insectivorous bats. The serum of 324 bats from 14 species was tested, and 21 bats from 5 species (including 1 insectivorous bat) had Nipah virus neutralizing antibodies. Later, Nipah virus was isolated from the urine of black-throated flying foxes, further confirming that flying foxes are the natural hosts of Nipah virus.

Research results on Nipah virus indicate that this virus outbreak is likely to be closely related to deforestation: the reduction of forest area and lack of food have forced flying foxes to migrate from their traditional forest habitats to the forest edges. Feeding from nearby orchards; and there are many pig farms in Malaysia adjacent to orchards. Fruits contaminated by flying foxes fall to the ground and are eaten by pigs, thereby introducing deadly viruses to human society.

●Symptoms | Symptoms include acute onset, fever, headache, behavioral changes, muscle spasm, and tachycardia. Then, the patient begins to coma, neurological symptoms and signs progressively worsen, and breathing is extremely difficult and irreversible. Hypotension and peak fever. The typical patient's time from onset to death is only 6 days. Most patients have symptoms of encephalitis, and a few have symptoms of atypical pneumonia.

Mortality rate is around 50%

The spread killed thousands of pigs and spread to humans within weeks, killing 105 of the 276 people infected.

Monkeypox: Date of occurrence: May 2003

●Place of occurrence|At least 33 suspected cases of monkeypox appeared in 3 states in the Midwest of the United States. In 1958, scientists first discovered monkeypox virus in monkeys in the laboratory. This virus can also infect many species of mice and rabbits, and ground squirrels are important hosts of monkeypox virus. In 1970, scientists first discovered in Africa that someone was infected with the monkeypox virus, whose symptoms were similar to those of smallpox. In 2003, monkeypox reappeared in the United States and became widespread in a small area.

●Communication animals|Gambia marmot. According to a tracking survey by the U.S. health department, almost all monkeypox patients in the United States have been in close contact with a pet called "prairie dog," which is a common wild rodent on the plains of the Midwestern United States. The health department discovered that a Gambia rat raised by a pet wholesaler in Illinois, USA, first transmitted monkeypox virus to prairie dogs. The prairie dogs were then given to two pet stores in Wisconsin and purchased by some customers. It is possible that some of these prairie dogs have migrated to other states in the United States.

The mortality rate is about 10%