That's horrible, and how can anyone find that ok.
Per "Guns, Germs, and Steel", it's not even strategic, because diversification of existing strains should naturally select the least deadly, as well as spread antibodies across species boundaries.
Per "Guns, Germs, and Steel", it's not even strategic, because diversification of existing strains should naturally select the least deadly, as well as spread antibodies across species boundaries.
This only works for diseases where symptoms and being contagious are concurrent. In the case of Covid-19 we know that humans can be contagious without experiencing negative symptoms. The potentially fatal symptoms appear later on.
The danger with that is that there is no reason for evolutionary processes to favor a less deadly strain as the disease has a window to spread before it starts damaging you. The evolutionary pressure towards being less deadly only happens because a disease that kills people too fast doesn't have time to spread as far as a less lethal strain.
In the case of Covid the disease could easily evolve the opposite direction: to be 100% fatal after two weeks of non-symptomatic contagion. It would still be able to spread just fine using its initial two week period, so there would be little to no evolutionary pressure toward lower fatality rates.
What do you think mink farms are?
After all that you have to be pretty callous and self-important as a species to think "Humans > Minks"
You belong to a certain group, in this case humans, and your tendency seems to be to apply measures of value that reward the traits at which your group naturally excels. Which all reduce to physiological traits which were no choice of your own.
If you can't judge one race superior to another for physiological differences (e.g skin color), then how can you in good conscious judge one species superior to another for the same thing, i.e. physiological differences?
I'm always surprised that people generally reject sexism, racism, nationalism, and various other forms of tribalism yet speciesism never seems to register as directly analogous and similarly worthy of condemnation.
Not by the measure of the luster of their coat.
'Humans are the best therefore human measures are the best therefore humans are the best'
[Caged] minks probably don't think that humans > minks by any measure that they value.
But I suppose if I wanted to raise thousands of mentally disabled humans in cages for the purpose of skinning them and selling their hides I would probably justify it to myself by asserting my inherent superiority based on their potential inability to replicate certain biological processes in the fatty organ within their craniums.
What is morally right, what is ethically right, what is legal, what is against the law, what is allowable, what is doable -
Is all social construct.
But if one can't judge species according to their own natural abilities we can still judge them according to their interactions with other species. This is where humans, come out looking poor. Mink do not negatively impact humans, and would have essentially no interaction with humans, but humans willfully imprison and brutalize millions of mink for frivolous pleasures.
If you've got something that says otherwise, let's have it.
When you jump to conclusions you don't describe the world at large, you only describe yourself.