The Walking Dead may have lost Rick and Maggie, but it gained A Good Boy.
Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl on AMC’s long-running zombie series, has been bugging producers for years to give him a dog. He finally got his wish this season. The dog’s name: Dog. “I love it. I think he’s the smartest cast member we got,” Reedus said. “We just did a scene the other day that ended up being the opposite of what it was supposed to be because the dog just wanted to do something else, and it came out so much better. He’ll probably be running the show. It’s great! I love it. He loves me, too.” But the dog — real name: Seven — does beg an important question: why haven’t we seen any zombie animals?
Science has an answer for that.
“Some viruses are very species-specific,” said Tara Smith, a microbiologist and infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University, told Live Science. “Humans seem to be the only host for those, they don’t jump species… One of the ways we think Ebola may have spread into people, especially the 2014 West African people, was contact with bats or potentially eating bats, we’re not 100 percent sure. Either way, bats seem to the reservoir, but they don’t seem to be affected by it. It’s not symptomatic in them, but it causes huge symptoms in humans.” In other words, some diseases don’t jump from species to species; what’s harmful to a human (or turns them into a “walker”) may not affect a dog:
“So, whatever it is, it still seems to be human specific, otherwise you would expect to see zombie animals,” Smith said. “Viruses typically have a tropism — that means they can only bind to certain types of cells. Sometimes the protein they have that would bind to cells might be ubiquitous to all animals or all mammalian species, or it can be really specific.”
Still, Smith warns against Daryl’s new best friend in a world overrun by zombies. “[Humans should] minimize time spent in close contact with [their] animals,” she said. “That way, if there is an outbreak, at least you have some separation between your animals and the people.” Poor Daryl can’t catch a break.
(Via Live Science)