Zombie Minks Seriously, what is it about minks? These animals are always causing trouble.
Last October, a mink farm in northwestern Spain was infected with a deadly bird flu, H5N1. More than 50,000 minks were euthanized as a result. Then there was Denmark’s Great Mink Disaster of 2020, when more than 15 million minks were culled to prevent the spread of coronavirus, only to rise from their graves shortly thereafter. Thanks to that catastrophe, I now have a recurring nightmare in which hordes of radioactive minks come back from the dead and wipe out human civilization.
Although mutant weasels are more likely to appear in a new HBO show than in real life, animal viruses pose a major risk to humanity, Faye Flam writes. The mink problem is a direct result of our desire to consume mass quantities of meat, eggs and other dairy products. That has encouraged farmers to crowd their farms with animals. But claustrophobic chickens are not good at fending off the flu. They literally are “genetically identical, have no immunity to influenza and make easy kindling for viral bonfire,” according to this investigation from The New Republic. And so we get outbreaks of H5N1, causing egg prices to skyrocket and mink farms to become hotbeds of infection.
The solution to our MCDD (Mink Chicken Disease Disaster) is two-fold, Faye explains:
- Stop crowd-crushing our chickens, even if it means paying more for eggs.
- Re-evaluate our love for mink fur, which might be responsible for the next pandemic.
Your mom’s grumbling about the cost of her ham and cheese omelette at the local diner is the least of our worries. Bird flu can now reach all sorts of new hosts, from seals to grizzly bears. It’s not clear whether H5N1 can be transmitted to people, but if the minks keep stirring up trouble, we may soon find out.