• Question: What sort of illnesses can animals get and are they life threatning???

    Asked by laffe2taffe to Claire on 7 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by demileedoo.
    • Photo: Claire Vinten

      Claire Vinten answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Hi there 🙂

      Good question! Animals can get lots of illnesses that humans get, for example have you heard of diabetes? or cancer? How about HIV? Animals also get versions of those. There are quite a few that are life threatening:
      *cancer
      *heart disease
      *FIV (like HIV but for cats)
      *Rabies

      The biggest difference between human and animal illnesses is that animals don’t really have heart attacks like humans do. But most other diseases you can think of in humans, animals get.

      Hope that answers your question!
      Claire 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: rosieroo223

    rosieroo223 commented on :

    what is FIV and HIV ?

  • Photo: Claire

    Claire commented on :

    HIV is something called Human Immunodeficiency Virus. But don’t worry about the big words. All it is is a virus that gets into human blood and stops the person from being about to fight off illnesses – so anyone with HIV gets lots of illnesses and gets very poorly from them. FIV is Feline immunodeficiency virus – again don’t worry about the big words, but notice the word ‘Feline’ which just means ‘cat’. So this is the same virus, but instead of infecting ‘humans’ it infects ‘cats’. It causes the same problems in cats as it does in humans – it makes them very bad at fighting off illness. Eventually they will get an illness that will kill them because they can’t fight it off. Does that make sense?