“We call on all pet owners, all French people who are sensitive to the animal cause, to relay massively that it would be devoid of common sense and humanity to abandon your animal for false rumors. If the president of the Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA), Jacques-Charles Fombonne, adopts such a solemn tone, it is because he is deeply worried because of the consequences of the coronavirus crisis.
The SPA draws all the more the alarm signal that “the public poundlands, as well as the shelters of the associations of animal protection which recover the animals near these poundlands to make them readapt, are already practically all saturated in terms of capacity of 'Home ".
"If we were left with even only 1% of domestic animals released by their owners, no association would be able to cope with such a wave of abandonments, alarms Jacques-Charles Fombonne. And this would in fact lead to a massive wave of euthanasia in the pound, as provided for by French law. "
Rumors have been circulating on the Internet for weeks, suggesting that one could be infected by Covid-19 via his dog or cat. "In Italy, there have been dropouts because of this rumor," sighs Anissa Putois, spokesperson for the animal protection association Peta.
The fact is that a dog did test positive in Hong Kong a few weeks ago. Which sowed doubt. All the more so in France where it is estimated that almost 18 million dogs and cats live in our homes. "In theory, the virus has no problem infecting animal cells, but there is no data to confirm that you can be infected by your dog or cat or that you can contaminate them yourself if you is sick ”, comments Samira Fafi-Kremer, head of the virology department of the Strasbourg University Hospital (Bas-Rhin).
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Seized by the government, the National Health Security Agency for its part deemed "unlikely" the transmission of Covid-19 from humans to another animal species. In a press release, a college of scientific experts gathered urgently to decide on the case of the Hong Kong dog stresses that the "genome of the virus" could have been "detected in the nasal and oral cavities" of the animal, without that provides "sufficient evidence" of his infection.
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The virus could have settled on the truffle or any “wet mucosa” of the canine, “without necessarily replicating it”. "There is no evidence that pets and farm animals play a role in the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus," conclude the experts.
"Strictly no risk"
Jean-Michel Pawlotsky, head of the biology and pathology department at the Henri-Mondor hospital in Créteil (Val-de-Marne), is even more positive, saying that we must "twist our necks at this crazy rumor". "There is absolutely no risk in either direction," says the virologist. Thanks to the species barrier, there is no viral infection that can pass from animals to humans and vice versa. "
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But then, how to explain that the Covid-19 apparently managed to pass in China from a bat to a pangolin then from pangolin to man? "The fact that a pangolin bought alive found itself host to the virus, perhaps via bat droppings, and that the virus then passed to humans, is at the outset an exceptional epidemiological accident", insists Jean -Michel Pawlotsky.