Az állatok megjelenése a földrajztudományban: az állatföldrajzi régióktól a geográfia és az animal studies kapcsolatáig

This paper investigates how animals have appeared in geographical works from the discipline’s institutionalisation until recently. I scrutinize the different animal geographies in broader context to shed light on the motivations behind why geographers focused on animals from different perspectives. This overview is especially important for evaluating the novelty of the ‘new’ animal geography. The distribution of animals on Earth has been investigated in many ‘geographical’ works since the 18th century but most of them were not written by ‘geographers’, even after the institutionalisation of the discipline. The geography of domestication and domesticated animals also has a long history, but the Berkeley School, whose representatives were especially active in this field, was pushed into the background in the second part of the 20th century. The ‘new’ animal geography that focused on the human-animal relation started to unfold in the 1990s.

Animals as and on Resource Frontiers

This paper attempts to locate changing interspecies relations in the dynamism and violence of capitalist expansion on a world scale, setting out two primary ways that the rising exploitation of non-human animals contributed to the development of settler-colonial economies, destabilization of indigenous societies, and transformation of ecosystems. One path was set by burgeoning demand essentially turning some wild animal species into increasingly valuable commodities and driving the rising scale and systematization of extraction and trade, which tended to quickly undermine conditions of abundance and make these animal frontiers very mobile. The second way started from the introduction of domesticated animals, with the muscle power and bodily commodities derived from proliferating populations valued not only in the expansion of agricultural landscapes but also in the formation and functioning of other resource frontiers, and ultimately bound up in waves of enclosures and expulsions. This framework seeks to simultaneously pose challenges for historical analysis and provide insights that help to understand the trajectory of animal life today.

Are Humans More Like Wolves or Dogs?

What makes humans a unique species? How did ancient humans evolve to live together and cooperate with each other? Research on the evolution of prehistoric humans shows that we have some characteristics in common with domesticated animals, like dogs, cows, and pigs. These similarities led researchers to propose that the human species has also undergone a type of domestication, which decreased our aggression and increased our social nature. In this article, we examine this idea and present an alternative: that the human species did not become domesticated like pets or farm animals, but instead evolved the ability to control its emotions, similar to other highly social species, like wolves. Emotional control allows us to restrain our aggression or promote it, depending on the situation. We think that emotional control is what allowed the human species to develop unique ways of communication in the animal kingdom.

LncRNAs in domesticated animals: from dog to livestock species

Animal genomes are pervasively transcribed into multiple RNA molecules, of which many will not be translated into proteins. One major component of this transcribed non-coding genome is the long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), which are defined as transcripts longer than 200 nucleotides with low coding-potential capabilities. Domestic animals constitute a unique resource for studying the genetic and epigenetic basis of phenotypic variations involving protein-coding and non-coding RNAs, such as lncRNAs. This review presents the current knowledge regarding transcriptome-based catalogues of lncRNAs in major domesticated animals (pets and livestock species), covering a broad phylogenetic scale (from dogs to chicken), and in comparison with human and mouse lncRNA catalogues. Furthermore, we describe different methods to extract known or discover novel lncRNAs and explore comparative genomics approaches to strengthen the annotation of lncRNAs. We then detail different strategies contributing to a better understanding of lncRNA functions, from genetic studies such as GWAS to molecular biology experiments and give some case examples in domestic animals. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current lncRNA annotations and suggest research directions to improve them and their functional characterisation.

People, animals, and island encounters: A pig’s history of the Pacific

This essay traces the diffusion of pigs and the introduction of new practices of pig husbandry in East Asia and the Pacific, with particular attention to the cases of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Japan. Countering the trend in animal history to emphasize environmental and genetic factors, it demonstrates that discourses of property, sovereignty, freedom, and slavery, brought to the region with modern imperialism, played a decisive role in shaping relationships between people and domesticated animals. The essay concludes that global diffusion of capitalist forms of animal husbandry depended on a process of disembedding animals from earlier social roles. This process took different forms in different places. It was in part ecological and in part economic, but must be understood first in the context of the movement of political ideas.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 in domesticated animals and its potential of transmission: A meta-analysis

Background and Aim: The coronavirus diseases-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global lockdown, which has limited the mobility of the public, and thus, more time is spent with their pets. Unfortunately, many social media have blamed pet animals as a reservoir of severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the etiologic agent of COVID-19, triggering a panic abandonment of pets. However, no article has summarized the information regarding the role of pets as SARS-CoV-2 reservoirs. This study aimed to evaluate the role of pets as a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 on the basis of research papers (i.e., animal model, surveillance, and case report) published in 2020. Materials and Methods: The review was conducted using articles from the PubMed database in 2020, using the keywords "COVID-19 in domesticated animals," which were screened and analyzed. Only the data from research articles were mimicked and transformed to conduct a meta-analysis. The meta-analysis was conducted regarding the effects of inhabitation and viral shedding in pets. In this study, we used 95% confidence intervals. Results: A total of 132 papers in PubMed were related to the keywords, whereas only 12 papers were appropriate to answer the dynamics of the role of pets as the reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. Seven studies indicated the potential of cat-cat (4/7), human-cat (2/7), and human-dog (1/7) SARS-CoV-2 transmission. No study proved the presence of cat-human transmission. Another study showed that comingling did not affect SARS-CoV-2 viral shedding among a cat and dog. Furthermore, the viral shedding of cats and dogs caused asymptomatic manifestations and generated neutralizing antibodies within a short period of time. Conclusion: SARS-CoV-2 transmission is present in domesticated animals, especially in pet cats and dogs, and transmission occurs between animals of the same species (cat-cat). The reverse zoonosis (zooanthroponosis) was found from human to cat/dog (comingled) with asymptomatic clinical signs due to the representation of neutralizing antibodies.

Advances in Understanding of the Immune Response to Mycobacterial Pathogens and Vaccines through Use of Cattle and Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis as a Prototypic Mycobacterial Pathogen

Lack of understanding of the immune response to mycobacterial pathogens has impeded progress in development of vaccines. Infection leads to development of an immune response that controls infection but is unable to eliminate the pathogen, resulting in a persistent infection. Although this puzzle remains to be solved, progress has been made using cattle as a model species to study the immune response to a prototypic mycobacterium, Mycobacterium a. paratuberculosis (Map). As chronicled in the review, incremental advances in characterizing the immune response to mycobacteria during the last 30 years with increases in information on the evolution of mycobacteria and relA, a gene regulating the stringent response, have brought us closer to an answer. We provide a brief overview of how mycobacterial pathogens were introduced into cattle during the transition of humankind to nomadic pastoralists who domesticated animals for food and farming. We summarize what is known about speciation of mycobacteria since the discovery of Mybacterium tuberculsis Mtb, M. bovis Mbv, and Map as zoonotic pathogens and discuss the challenges inherent in the development of vaccines to mycobacteria. We then describe how cattle were used to characterize the immune response to a prototypic mycobacterial pathogen and development of novel candidate vaccines.

The Role of Wild and Domesticated Animals in the Origin and Transmission of the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2

The review highlights animal coronaviruses, their pathogenicity, and the possible role of domestic and agricultural animals in the further spread of the COVID-19. Joint researches have been established amongst international team of scientists regarding a close phylogenetic relationship of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 with the coronaviruses of bats and carnivores, especially with the representatives of Felidae family (domestic cats). However, the case of Middle Eastern SARS transmitted by camels is required a special attention to biological safety measures in farms.

Diet of Leopards Panthera pardus fusca inhabiting protected areas and human-dominated landscapes in Goa, India

The diet of leopards occupying human-dominated and protected areas (PAs) in Goa, India was analyzed through scat analysis. A total of 117 scats, 55 from wildlife sanctuaries/ national parks and 62 from human-dominated areas were collected and analyzed. Analysis of 55 scats from protected forest revealed the presence of only wild prey in the leopard diet, whereas 61% of scats collected from human-dominated areas consisted of only wild prey, 29% of domesticated animals, and 10% a mixture of both wild prey & domesticated animals. Of the prey biomass consumed in human-dominated areas, domestic animals constituted only 33% of the leopard diet. Among all leopard scats, 71% contained only one prey species, 28% contained two species, and 1% contained three.