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The authorities’ demand to destroy all these mammals in the country turned out to be illegal. Now they are preparing an invoice.
Danish authorities decided to destroy all minks on farms after finding a mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in these animals, which can spread between humans. They later claimed that this decision was wrong.
However, they do not regret the destruction of animals, but they did not have a legal basis to demand it from the ranchers. Now in Denmark a corresponding bill is being prepared. Correspondent.net says the details.
“Whoever wears furs, digs a grave for himself and the others”
The coronavirus infects mammals. It is found in the body of cats, dogs, minks, and ferrets. Most animals carry the virus without any symptoms and cannot infect humans. However, mink and their ferret cousins have been shown to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to humans.
On November 6, the Danish State Institute for the Fight against Infectious Diseases said that more than 200 people had received the mutated mink coronavirus.
Before that, on November 4, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced the government’s decision to destroy all mink on his country’s farms.
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Denmark is considered the world’s largest producer of mink fur. Up to 17 million of these mammals live on 1,139 farms in the country. During the past week, animals were killed on 67 farms.
On November 10, Danish Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Mogens Jensen, told Danish television that the government has no legal basis to require breeders to kill all minks, both sick and healthy.
The existing legal framework, according to the minister, allows the authorities to demand the destruction of animals only in infected fur farms and within a 7.8 kilometer radius of them.
“We were wrong. There is no legal basis for requiring mink farmers to slaughter animals outside of established zones. We must have the authority if we want to require this,” Jensen said.
Later, in a comment to Reuters, the minister lamented the “lack of clarity” in the original instructions given to farmers.
“I take responsibility for what is happening in my ministry. It cannot be otherwise,” Jensen said.
It is not about lamenting the slaughter of animals, but about the lack of legal regulations. The government urged breeders to continue killing minks.
The bill, which will allow such decisions, is now being considered by the country’s parliament in three readings, the minister said.
In addition to Denmark, minks infected with the new coronavirus have been found in five more countries: Spain, Italy, the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden, according to the World Health Organization website.
Led by virologist Marion Koopman of Rotterdam Erasmus University Medical Center, the coronavirus outbreak was studied in detail in 16 of the early mink farms. 66 employees and 11 stray cats were found to have the same variant of the coronavirus as in the minks from which it was transmitted.
In recent months, a large number of minks, around 2.4 million individuals, have been gassed in the Netherlands. In Spain, 100,000 minks were previously destroyed.
In all cases, according to the WHO, the virus was originally transmitted to animals from humans. However, the organization notes, there is a possibility of a postback.
Authorities in different countries tried to curb the spread of the virus between minks and other methods, including banning the movement of animals between farms, but other strategies have failed.
It’s also worth noting that minks would have been killed anyway, as this is what happens on farms – they are bred for fur.
Correspondent.net He has repeatedly written about the threats to humanity from livestock farms: greenhouse gas emissions, water and soil pollution, and resistance to antibiotics.
In 2020, it became clear that the increasing human consumption of animal products could lead to catastrophic viral epidemics. More on this in Less meat: How to stop future pandemics.
After spreading within the animal population, the virus can return to humans through close contact with minks that are already in mutated form.
This could make the vaccines pointless as they cannot protect against the mutated strain.
“He who wears fur is digging a grave for himself and those around him,” quotes the German edition of the Tageszeitung, PETA animal rights expert Yoanna Fuos.
Science has long shown that on these farms, where many animals live in a small area, the mutation of such pathogens occurs constantly, they say in the organization.
For example, raccoon dogs are suspected of carrying the SARS virus, which killed hundreds of people in 2002-2004. Raccoon dogs are also widely kept on farms and also in narrow cages.
“This is a terrible and incomprehensible practice, especially since today there are artificial furs that at first glance hardly differ from natural ones. None of us need furs,” says Fuos.
As for pets, studies by the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health and the Friedrich Leffler Institute in Germany have shown that most of them are practically immune to the new type of coronavirus.
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