Somewhat related, there is a vaccine for cats in the works meant to prevent feline chronic kidney disease. If successful it could massively increase the lifespan of domestic cats.
I’m literally having my 19 year old cat put down tomorrow due to kidney disease and I very much wish for him to feel young and healthy again. It sucks.
Sorry for your loss mate
If successful it could
Wanna bet what capitalism is going to say about that?
Unpopular opinion: There are already way too many domestic cats and they are responsible for the extinction of various species, mostly birds. They are amongst the most problematic invasive species in the world. Its probably not a good idea to increase their lifespan…
Popular opinion: I love cats
One of my family cats is currently at the end of her life due to kidney disease. It really sucks, glad they’re doing something about it. Now if only they could do the same for dogs.
This makes me very happy, thank you for sharing!
That killed my childhood cat. Would be awesome for future kids to not experience what I did.
Kind of seems like losing a pet is an important part of growing up tbh.
Accepting death is an important part of growing up, but no animal deserves to die just to be a goddamn teachable moment
Kind of doesn’t.
I dunno accepting death as an inevitability seems important since since we otherwise struggle hard to ignore it in western culture and by extension can create a lot of suffering.
A pet doesn’t need to die for that. If you look around… Death is everywhere!
[Starts singing and dancing a musical number down the street]
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They sure are!
But humans (there is a dig line too actually) are complicated, furst treatments are out aleeady (works not very well, on only on 2 of the 7 base topics IIRC).
Next 10 years will be interesting.
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Science is just the method by which technological advancements are achieved, it doesn’t decide the priorities. That privilege falls to capital, and by extension, capitalists.
I appreciate you are setting up a sort of platonic ideal of what science is but I think its important to deal with the real people and processes that science is performed by and we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we fail to acknowledge how those people and processes have often worked hand in hand with capitalist and colonial projects. We need to be introspective about how those choices have influenced the science (and the methods!) that’s been done. We, as scientists, engineers and science appreciators need to do this work so we can make different and better choices.
