#cn animal death

[alexseanchai]

well. probably about to be a very good thing I've already established Yuri on Ice as a comfort rewatch.

[animeomelette]

There is so much packed visually into these couple of shots, even before she opens her mouth and starts raggedly pleading to Madoka, the fact that Homura has completely lost her cool and is giving up on hiding her superpower is shown by the fact that she blasts holes in the little predator with a pistol like she was wielding a machine gun

[dirigibleplumbing]

my dog passed away suddenly less than an hour ago, while we were at the vet. she was fine yesterday. I had dogs growing up but they each passed after I left for college and after long illnesses. she's my first dog who was my own. it doesn't seem real. I don't know what to do.

[alexseanchai]

[image: a graph titled "What's Killing North America's Birds?" Per-year estimates of mortality. Source: Loss et al., 2015. Cats account for 2.6 billion bird deaths. Windows, 624 million. Vehicles, 214 million. Power lines, 57 million. Communication towers, 6.8 million. Wind turbines, up to 679 thousand.]

as a huge lover of birds, 90% of the concern against wind turbines being used for energy is literally just pro fossil fuel propaganda. birds ARE at a risk however there is a lot of strategies even as simple as painting one of the blades that reduces a lot of accidental deaths. additionally renewable energy sources will do more in favor of the environment that would positively impact birds (and all of us). one study found over one million bird deaths from wind turbines. while that is a shockingly high number and we should work to drastically shrink it, at least 1.3 billion birds die to outdoor cats on a yearly basis. it was never about caring about birds

[niennandil-me-writes]

lost friend

cn: animal death, rabies

You wake up from sounds in the backyard, deep growls and muffled voices. Not that loud, but then again, you haven’t been sleeping soundly, worry weighing down on you. And when you look out the window, and see your mother and oldest brother, and the dog, you jump up, don’t even bother to throw on a sweater over your nightshirt. You run outside, into the yard, temporarily unbothered by the icy cold and the snow under your bare feet.

“What are you –?” You freeze, not from the cold, but from seeing the hatchet in your mother’s hands. You stare at her, then at the dog, his body spasming, straining against the leash around his neck, which is attached to a long pole your brother is holding fast to keep him at a distance. As your eyes adjust to the moonlight, you see that they have put a muzzle on him, binding his mouth shut, spittle dripping down.

Your brother looks up for a short moment, but then fixes his eyes on the dog again. “Go back to sleep. We’ll just be going on a walk real quick.” And he shoots you a smile that only makes the lie more obvious.

Your mother just shakes her head. “He’s old enough to know.” And then she looks at you with that expression adults get when they give you an Important Talk and you can feel your stomach fall. “We’re putting the dog down.”

“No! You can’t do that!” You want to run to the dog, your friend, your companion, but your brother stands in your way.

“He will bite you”, he says.

“He would never! He never bit no one! He never did anything wrong! And just last month – he protected our farm from that wolf, didn’t he?”

Your mother nods gravely. “He was a good dog. But he also got a nasty bite from that wolf. I feared this would happen. Gone rabid. We’re doing him a favor, really. He’d be dead within the week anyway.”

“Would not!” You know you sound like a child, but you don’t care. You can’t let this happen. Can’t let them kill him. You’ve known that dog for as long as you can remember. “And he’s not dangerous, never was! You’re lying!”

You look down at the dog, convulsing in his binds. His eyes dart around the yard, confused, scared. And when they catch your glance, they seem unfocused, unrecognizing. You don’t hold back the tears anymore.

“There’s nothing of the friend you knew left in him anymore.”, your mother says with a calm voice. And then she kneels down in front of you, puts a hand on your shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Teo, I know you loved that dog. You shouldn’t have to witness this. Go back inside now.”

And you nod, wiping the tears and snot from your face. And without another look on the animal that was once your friend, you run inside, crawl into bed and put a pillow over your head to shut out any noises that might come from outside.

[melina-mellow]

Apparently the guy responsible for Genshin's entire plot favorite characters are Xiao and Scara...

Truly a man of culture I see.

[foxsketch6543]

Ok, this is just fucked up, man! This is almost sounds like something Disney would do. (Not fully but y’all probably have an idea) And it kind of explains like… A LOT. The Adults are drowning more than swimming TBH.

Feel free to add on to this post if any of y’all have more info on the situation going on with the company when you can.

[alexseanchai]

the tortoiseshell is Mila, the gray is Zoe, the calico was Thea, and the pupper is Gabrielle

Hey everybody. My buddy @oldest-man-alive-blog just lost his beloved old kitty Jonathan rather suddenly. Let's please fill this thread with adorable animal friends for him. Please absolutely break my notifications reblogging this with pictures of your favorite pets.

(Nothing with more than 8 legs, please and thank you.)

[alexseanchai]

do not fucking attempt to scam me with appeals to dying cat

[formulatrash]

jfc apologies for this vent but just got home from work to genuinely one of the most distressing things I've ever been randomly faced with

[cn: animal death, injury, not the cat]

I guess since Indy has been more or less out of action (she's still alive but not exactly moving much, even by her low standards) mice/the tiny rats you get in London have decided they can enter the chat and one of my flatmates apparently decided to deal with this by arming two extremely inhumane traps in the kitchen

and then didn't tell any of the rest of us

so I get in like lalalala time to make myself a big glass of oh my god why is there a squeaking, distressed animal smearing blood on the floor with its legs trapped in a Saw-style nightmare device. so I have to stand there for 10 minutes being like ok Hazel you have to kill it. it's in distress. you have to kill it. you have to put it out of its misery and I'm like I'm really not like. prepped for this. I'm not in a place for 'having to stamp on a tiny, distressed animal on my kitchen floor'

which was all procrastination I shouldn't have done cus in the end I decided idk if the damage was terminal but it looked like it was still fighting, so picked up it and the trap and set it free outside the house. it could still sort of walk so idk, rats and things are pretty gnarly.

but like wtf flatmates a) who tf even HAS inhumane traps these days did they buy them in 1806, I've always suspected Jamie might be a vampire, b) who tf sets them and then like, doesn't message the flat groupchat like oh btw guys don't go in the kitchen because you could step on a mousetrap and also there might be dying animals in there??????????

like I don't think I am being an unreasonable baby to be both really pretty distressed by having to work out what to do about this thing I did not cause and also ?????? flatmates, please.

(clearly this is not the worst thing I have ever seen but I simply did not expect any level of animal injury and gore in my kitchen at 1:20am)

[scentedluminarysoul]

The Fall of the House of Usher is really, really good! Why don't I see more people talking about it!?

And Rahul Kohli and Malcolm Goodwin in the same show again! I miss iZombie so much 😭

Watching Midnight Mass now. Why the fuck does Mike Flanagan hate cats so much???? It's like Stephen King and dogs all over again

[alexseanchai]

[image: tweet by primawesome: "My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked him how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he's just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying."]

let your pet outside unwatched. do not worry about local songbirds or ecosystems. let delicious cat outside. especially one you took claws off of or capped with dull chewy bits. ignore the fact my icon is coyote. let cat outside it wants outside do not worry about the birds it kills that i will also eat

[sickgraymeat]

Sometimes I think abt how Kelsey’s dad is all about responsibility but he let her replace her birds over and over because he didn’t know how else to make it better

[jamiesinverguenza]

[CN: mention of reading about an animal death]

So a thing that I went through earlier this year was having to actually confront my climate grief, and feel my despondency. I was forced to acknowledge my 'there's no hope for the future,' sit-and-stare-at-the wall-for-a few-weeks level of despair.

A thing that helped me pull myself out of it was reading about an impossibly adorable baby two-toed sloth that was born at the Cincinnati Zoo, and then reading a little bit about sloths, and about rescues and sanctuaries that look after wild sloths and other rain forest animals. Letting myself be interested in an animal, in the way that I was fascinated with dinosaurs when I was little, put both really cute animals and also real live humans who are working really hard to protect sloths and their shrinking, increasingly dangerous habitat on my radar and social media feeds. When I saw that, I didn't feel so isolated or overwhelmed by my despair. It gave me new energy and motivation and interest in environmentalism, and in taking care of people and animals around me, and it's literally one of the best things that happened to me this year.

This is also how I learned about exotic animal 'encounters' though, and how I started to appreciate how harmful they can be. I just read about a zorse, a half zebra, half horse that must have been bred for profit. The sanctuary that rescued the zorse also rescued a pair of sick zebras from an animal show, one of whom died recently, after a short and mostly miserable existence where they rarely received the medical care they needed. The person who runs the sanctuary is reasonably very angry at what the zebras had to endure.

Fortunately, the zorse is not only okay, but seems to be thriving over at the sanctuary. For every terrible story of illness and loss, there's an animal who survived, and the human caretakers who helped them. Everything is terrible, but it's not too late, and we aren't entirely powerless, even if it feels that way. We can build a new world, where all of us can live, if we want! ...right?

[dirigibleplumbing]

my birthday is tomorrow! (the 19th.)

my beloved emotional support dog passed away suddenly. I've been having a rough time and am missing a big part of the support I used to have.

so if you’re up for it, it would make my day if you were to comment on one of my fanworks or reblog one of my tumblr posts for my art or writing. comments of emoiji or exclamation points or a single word or a short sentence are all welcome.

[excalculus]

I saw some mentions of rabies going around again and have no clue what's set it off this time, but given recent scientific developments I want to revisit the idea of curing symptomatic rabies.

First things first: there is still no practical way to do this. The famous Milwaukee Protocol fails far more frequently than it succeeds, and even the successes are not making it out in anything like a normal state. It's been argued that it should no longer be considered a valid treatment [1] due to these issues; any continued use is because there's literally nothing else on the table.

However. There are now two separate studies showing it's possible to cure rabies in mice after the onset of symptoms. The lengths you have to go to in order to pull this off are drastic, to put it mildly, and couldn't really be adapted to humans even if you wanted to. But proof of concept is now on the board.

long post under the cut, warnings for animal experimentation and animal death. full bibliography at the end and first mention of each source links to paper.

Quick recap - rabies is a viral disease of mammals usually transmitted through the saliva of an infected animal. From a contaminated bite wound, it propagates slowly for anywhere from days to months until it reaches the central nervous system (CNS). Post-exposure vaccination can head it off during this phase, but once it reaches the CNS and neurological symptoms appear it's game over. There will typically be a prodromal phase where the animal doesn't act right - out at the wrong time of day, disoriented, abnormally friendly, etc. This will then progress to the furious (stereotypical "mad dog" disease) and/or paralytic phases, with death eventually caused by either seizures or paralysis of the muscles needed for breathing.

That's the course we're familiar with in larger animals. Mice, though, are fragile little creatures with fast metabolisms.

In the first study's rabies infection model, lab mice show rabies virus in the spinal cord by day 4 after infection and in the brain by day 5. Weight loss and slower movement start by day 7, paralysis starting from the hind limbs from day 8 on, and if not euthanized first they're dead by day 10-13. [2]

This study (fittingly conducted at the Institut Pasteur) had two human monoclonal antibodies, and wanted to see if there was any possibility they could be used to cure rabies after what we think of as the point of no return.

Injecting the antibodies into muscle saved some mice if done at days 2 or 4, and none if done later, even at high doses of 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight of each. Conclusion: targeting the virus out in the rest of the body is no use if it's already replicating in the CNS.

Getting a drug past the blood-brain barrier is, to use a highly technical term, really fucking hard. It's the sort of problem that even the best-funded labs and biggest companies in the world routinely fail at. And that's for small molecule drugs, which are puny compared to antibodies.

But this isn't drug development for a clinical trial. This is a very, very early proof-of-concept attempt, which means you're willing to ignore practicality to see if this idea is even remotely workable. So you can do things like brute force the issue by cutting through the skull to implant a microinfusion pump, which lets you deliver the antibodies directly into the normally-protected space around the brain. Combine this with the normal injections, and you can treat both the CNS and the rest of the body at the same time. Here's a survival graph of treated mice. X axis is days, Y axis is percentage of mice in that group still alive.

Figure 2A from reference 2, accessed February 2024

The fact that the blue, green, and purple lines did anything other than sink horribly to zero is unheard of. When the combination treatment was started at day 6, 100% of the mice survived. Started at day 7 (prodromal phase), 5 out of 9 mice recovered and survived. Started at day 8 (solidly symptomatic, paralysis already starting to set in), 5 of 15 mice recovered and survived. And when they say "survived", they kept these mice all the way to day 100 to make sure. Some of them had permanent minor paralysis but largely they were back to being normal mice doing normal mouse things. So, success, but by pretty extreme means.

Enter the second paper [3]. This was a different approach using a single human monoclonal antibody against Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV - closely related to rabies, similar symptoms in humans) to try for a cure without needing to deliver treatments directly into the CNS. They also made a luminescent version of ABLV that let them directly image viral activity, so they could see both where the virus was replicating and how much there was in a live mouse.

Figure 1 from reference 3, accessed February 2024

Mice infected with ABLV start showing symptoms around day 8. You can see in the figure that at day 3 there's viral replication in the foot at the site of infection, which has shifted into the spine and brain by day 10. So what happens if you give one of these doomed mice one single injection of the antibody into the body?

Done at day 3, the virus doesn't make it to the brain until day 14, and while disease does set in after that around 30% of the mice survive. Days 5 and 7 are much more interesting. Those mice still develop symptoms at day 8, but the imaging shows the amount of virus in their spines and brains never gets anywhere near the levels seen in untreated controls, and within days it starts to decrease. Around 80% of day 5 and 100% of day 7 mice survive.

Okay, sure, you can stop another lyssavirus, but technically you did start treatment before symptoms appeared. What about symptomatic rabies?

The rodent-adapted rabies strain CVS-11 starts causing symptoms as early as day 3 after infection, and untreated mice die between days 8 and 11. The same single dose of antibody saved 67% of mice treated on day 5 and 50% of mice treated on day 7. Without making the luminescent version of the virus there's no real-time imaging of the infection, but you can still track symptoms.

Figure 2 from reference 3, accessed February 2024. CVS-11 is the name of the rodent rabies strain and F11 is the name of the antibody.

Disease score is a combination of several metrics including things like whether the mice are behaving normally and whether they show signs of paralysis. In untreated mice it goes up and up, and then they die. If one of those lines starts coming back down and continues past day 10 or so, that's a mouse that recovered. The success rate isn't as good as against ABLV, but again, this is a rabies strain specifically adapted to rodents and treatment wasn't started until it was well-established in the CNS.

So how on earth is this happening? The antibody neutralizes both ABLV and rabies really well in a test tube, but we've already established that there's no way a huge lumbering antibody is making it past the blood-brain barrier without serious help. Something about the immune response is clearly making it in there though. And it turns out that if you start trying this cure in mice missing various parts of their immune systems, mice without CD4+ T cells don't survive even with the treatment. By contrast mice without CD8+ T cells take longer to work through the infection, but they eventually manage it and are immune to reinfection afterwards.

To grossly oversimplify the immune system here, CD4+ are mature helper T cells, which work mostly by activating other immune cells like macrophages (white blood cells) and CD8+ T cells (killer T cells) against a threat.

Normally, T cells are also kept out by the blood-brain barrier, but we know that in certain specific cases including viral infection they can pass it to migrate into the brain. In the brains of the infected mice for which antibody treatment either wasn't given or didn't work, you can find a roughly even mix of CD8+ and CD4+ T cells along with a whole lot of viral RNA. But in the brains of those successfully fighting off the infection, there's less viral RNA and the cells are almost exclusively CD4+. So the antibody doesn't work by neutralizing the virus directly - something about it is activating the animal's own immune system in a way that gives it a fighting chance.

Again, neither of these proof of concept treatments is really workable yet as a real world cure. The first one is almost hilariously overkill and still has a pretty good chance of failure. The second is less invasive but careful sequencing still shows both low-level viral replication and signs of immune response in the brains of the survivors even at day 139, so it may not be truly clearing the virus so much as trading a death sentence for life with a low-level chronic infection. But now we know that 1. curing rabies after symptoms begin is at least theoretically possible, and 2. we have some clues as to mechanisms to investigate further.

Not today. Not tomorrow. But maybe not never, either.

References:

Zeiler, F. A., & Jackson, A. C. (2016). Critical appraisal of the Milwaukee protocol for rabies: this failed approach should be abandoned. Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, 43(1), 44-51.

de Melo, G. D., Sonthonnax, F., Lepousez, G., Jouvion, G., Minola, A., Zatta, F., ... & Bourhy, H. (2020). A combination of two human monoclonal antibodies cures symptomatic rabies. EMBO molecular medicine, 12(11), e12628.

Mastraccio, K. E., Huaman, C., Coggins, S. A. A., Clouse, C., Rader, M., Yan, L., ... & Schaefer, B. C. (2023). mAb therapy controls CNS‐resident lyssavirus infection via a CD4 T cell‐dependent mechanism. EMBO Molecular Medicine, 15(10), e16394.