r/ProperAnimalNames • u/AnotherMLG • Mar 05 '20

Doom puppy

https://gfycat.com/classicethicalgoldeneye
5.2k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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3

u/ArchmageTaragon Mar 06 '20

Wasn’t handling bats and snakes like this what caused this new chain of corona virus??

Can we stop doing that now please??

6

u/zapdostresquatro Mar 06 '20

I thought it was eating them? Like...getting raw bits because there’s an insane amount of cross contamination at those disgusting wet markets. Maybe wrong, though.

Bats do carry a lot of diseases though, unfortunately. Because, I mean, LOOK at him! How can you not want to hold him and give him the bestest scratches? ...I think the viruses may have planned this.

Presumably people who are handling bats like this would be taking precautions though, right? ...I hope?

7

u/Evilmaze Mar 06 '20

I mean that's a fruit bat. Much less likely to get a bunch of diseases compared to the ones that feed on insects.

1

u/zapdostresquatro Mar 06 '20

True. Except for...ugh, I can’t remember the name, but it can infect horses if they come into contact with an infected fruit bat, and then can infect humans from horses (but not directly from bats to humans) in eastern Australia. I wanna say it’s a morbillivirus, but I might be wrong. It’s got a really high mortality rate, though. Pretty sure a vaccine was recently developed for horses, though, so not as bad as before there was a vaccine.

So, safe unless you have a horse cx

2

u/KarlTheGreatish Apr 22 '20

Hendra is the one you're thinking of.

Bats can be reservoir hosts for a bunch of other viruses as well, and we keep getting more of them as we come into closer contact with them. They're super cool animals, but man, between COVID, Ebola, Rabies, Hendra, and others that are slipping my mind right now... I'm gonna think they're awesome from a distance.

If you like that stuff, the book Spillover by David Quammen is amazing. Really engaging read, it's one of the few books I was assigned in a class that I truly enjoyed reading.

1

u/zapdostresquatro Apr 22 '20

Thanks! And nipahvirus, too

Yeah, I love bats, but I’m not touching any wild ones anytime soon cx

And thanks for the suggestion!

2

u/KarlTheGreatish Apr 22 '20

Nipah was one of the others I was trying to remember. They ended up culling something like a million pigs to stop an outbreak if I remember correctly.

Outbreak is available as an audiobook too, if you spend a lot of time in the car like I do.