See the source story.

Denmark is lucky that I’m not its father, otherwise I would spank that ass redder than Michigan is without voting machines!

Firstly, it is fucked that 107 million sweet little minky-bros had to die like this. I haven’t seen such needless slaughter of adorable faces since I marathoned Happy Tree Friends back in high school. (Damn you, Edgelord Teenage Scathing!) And their bodies probably aren’t even going to be used for anything now. This is a complete and total waste! Their deaths don’t even mean anything now! At least when I’m eating meat I can find solace in that fact that the animal died for the greatest causes of all; feeding me! But this, this is just sick.

Secondly, why does Denmark even farm mink? And under these conditions, no less? So that some ritzy bimbo can get pinot noir stains on her fur coat? Hunt the damn things if you want them so bad. You’d think after the conditions of the Wuhan wet markets were exposed at the beginning of the year and the sheer amount of diseases documented to come from them got out, there would be more of a concerted effort to phase out these kinds of places in the civilized world. Shit, if the democrats had spammed pictures like that online and taken up a more conservationist mentality rather than a doomsayer climatite position, they might have gotten more legal votes and tapped more of the younger voting blocks. But I guess they’re just inoculated against good ideas at this point.

But now let’s actually talk about this apparently new strain. If you ask me, it just sounds like another excuse to mandate new lockdown orders in Europe. That being the primary concern; that’s not to say there’s no possibility a genuine mutant could come of this. Early on in the pandemic there were reported cases of zoo animals and house pets contracting the coof. Whether or not it was specifically covid-19 is unclear. A lot of people don’t realize that the seasonal flu itself is, in fact, a corona virus; hence all the false positives you see in testing and why many people don’t even develop symptoms. Corona viruses have been floating around since forever, people have just never been this fucking paranoid about it until now.

But understand, I’m not an epidemiologist. Hell I’m not even technically a psychologist despite my degree (though I would love to do life-advice streams on DLive, keep an eye out for that later). So my understanding of the topic is limited to what I’ve read over the last year, my high school biology classes, and the game Plague Inc. But I do know this: Viruses are uniquely unstable compared to something like a bacteria or a prion. That is to say that they mutate more frequently. An the more hosts it can infect, the more vectors it has, the more widely it spreads, and the greater the odds of a new mutant become. That’s not the complicated part – that can be worked out logically. Natural selection, however, favors less salient viruses because the ones that have severe symptoms are more easily caught, contained, and “cured”. I am not sure, however, if that same selection pressure applies to livestock populations.

Since many of these animals go to slaughter anyway, I can’t image the same degree of health consciousness goes into their day to day “care”. Kind of hard to keep tens of thousands of animals healthy short of giving them generic antibiotics. This would mean that a more severe strain could emerge, go undetected until it was beyond the point of containment. This is how pandemics start, it is almost exclusively due to a disease jumping from animals to humans.

But will this be a big deal and cause a true pandemic, just a fresh wave of fear, or neither? Well, I don’t know, but I don’t really think it even matters at this point because Europe’s seemed to have reached its wit’s end with the shut downs. The less EU friendly ones in particular, but anger is more contagious than most viruses.

Rest in peace, Mink-Bros. We’ll never forget.

Watch STNC Episode 39