Zombie Cats

My spouse and I watched a fascinating show the other day on Animal Planet. It highlighted how canine distemper virus (CDV) was having a profound impact on big cats in the wild. It was called Man-Eating Zombie Cats: A Hunter's Fatal Mistake.

It was fascinating that they kept referring to them as “zombie cats.” This implies that the cats are becoming mindless killing machines, which, in fact, is very true. They lose all sense of fear, they attack prey they wouldn’t normally attack, and they can be found wandering city streets—sometimes without a clue as to what’s going on. If that doesn’t sound like a zombie, I don’t know what does.

What CDV does is attacks the central nervous system and eventually gets into the brain. It causes cats to behave abnormally. There have been documented cases of them attacking, killing, and consuming humans. Cats normally live very solitary lives and stay as far away from humans as possible, so this behavior is concerning.

Now, unlike fictional zombies that we see in books and movies, these cats are not returning from the dead to consume the living. However, like fictional zombies, these cats are acting out of character. Their natural fears and actions no longer exist. They begin acting in unnatural ways. Like fictional zombies, this becomes a problem because humans become the cats’ target.

In some zombie films, a virus is the cause of the zombie uprising. Viruses are great candidates because they are hard to kill and we still don’t know everything about them—and this is certainly true in the case of zombie cats. One of the biggest concerns scientists have about this particular case is that it’s incredibly hard to track how these cats are contracting the virus, how many will be affected by it, and how to eradicate the disease. As you can imagine, humans encroaching into the big cats’ habitat has had a huge impact on the spread of the virus.

It’s scary to think that something so small (the virus) could have such a major impact on the world. Zombies become a great metaphor for these fears because we don’t understand them, they are hard to kill, and they overrun a population. Once CDV gets into a cat population, it also overruns it and kills until there is nothing left.

This is exactly the type of thing I looked at while researching for my nonfiction zombie book. But my focus was on how viruses impact humans. I feel so sorry for the big cats and the humans that become their targets. Scientists, conservationists, and others are trying to control the outbreak and figure out ways to help the cat populations, but it’s going to take time. My fingers are crossed that they can find a solution to this concerning problem.

New Virus Resurrected... Will Scientists Create a New Zombie Threat?

 

   Scientists apparently have resurrected a 30,000-year-old virus from the frozen tundra of Siberia. 

Yes, that old. And while they say that the plithovirus is only a threat to amoeba, never say never, right?

All kinds of possibilities come to mind, especially when scientists already have grown an ancient flower and uncovered near whole  wooly mammoth DNA.  (See 14 Extinct Animals that Could be Resurrected - I vote for the Dodo bird.)

Scientists in the lab have long been horror movie and book fodder back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, especially when there is still that possibility of a virus jumping species. While scientists apparently have been harvesting the permafrost and ice in Siberia, according to the New York Times, for "decades" without signs of any infection, that doesn't mean it cannot happen. Just that it hasn't. Yet.

I'm of the mind that people mess with things they often shouldn't only because they can and because of the lure of the unknown. Who wouldn't want to see a baby mammoth walk the earth again? Who isn't curious about what ancient flowers and plants looked or smelled like?

But just because they can, does it mean they should? Because, you know, the inevitable often happens. Think Jurassic Park come to life. Think odd diseases appearing, or maybe viruses mutating and connecting with already growing antibiotic-resistant strains. 

  I'm not the first author to ponder the implications. Without getting into all the scientific explanations, I blamed a strange, mutated virus escaping from a lab for my version of the Z (zombie) virus in my book, GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie.

 The nice thing? It's fiction. But how long before maybe, it isn't?

(top art - freedigitalphotos.net)

Alien Zombies

I haven't actually had a chance to do any research this week because I've been busy with edits.  Not my own, unfortunately, but freelance projects.  I'm not really complaining, they pay, but I'm excited to get back to work on my zombie project!

Last week, I met with a friend and fellow author, Mike Brotherton, who happens to also be an astronomy professor.  We talked about what it would take for zombies to come from space--if they could come at all.  We also talked about his Launch Pad Workshop, which is freaking awesome and I had the pleasure of being an attendee in 2011.  Man, it seems like a long time ago!

If you recall, the zombies in Night of the Living Dead are created when a meteor with high amounts of radiation crashes onto Earth.  This film was made in 1968, a time when the effects of radiation were just coming to be known.  It was also a time when the space race was on, and no one knew what we were going to find out there.  Radiation causes a lot of awful things--cancer, sterility--but it's highly doubtful it would create zombies.  Because of the time, it was just a convenient causation.

The Ghosts of Mars is another film where zombies are created by an alien substance.  I haven't watched it again (yet), so I don't really remember the details, but the basic premise is that miners on Mars are turned into murderous creatures bent on ridding the planet of the human infestation.  It's a great film.  I really enjoy it, but it never really reached main-stream popularity.

So, anyway, the point was:  what would it take for zombies to come from space?  There is so much out there that we don't know, and there is a theory, called Panspermia, that proposes that all viruses come from space.  I need to do some more digging, but it's a fascinating idea.

The truth is, if there are pathogens in space, they can conceivably make their way to Earth.  Do you have any idea how many meteorites slam into our surface?  And they can potentially make us sick.  Like I said, I need to do a lot more digging to find answers, but the prospects are looking promising!

Zombie viruses and zombie shorts...

Saw this and thought, who needs to worry about a Z virus when you've got these idiots in labs, right?

 Chinese Researchers Develop New Virus in Veterinary Lab - crossing bird flu with human influenza

And.... I am also participating in A Story a Day for May, so I am posting zombie flash stories (what else?) over at my Candid Canine blog. See day 1.