[delichon]

The pig taboo and the cannibalism taboo may both be grounded in the folly of eating carriers dense with the same diseases that we are vulnerable to. It's the same thing that makes pigs good research animal models of human disease.

https://www.eara.eu/pigs-and-animal-research

[light_hue_1]

This just isn't true at all.

Pigs are used when we need models of physiology, like entire organ systems --- to know how something will affect large organ systems (this is also why xenotransplantation focuses on pigs so heavily). They aren't otherwise special when it comes to animal models of human disease. In terms of popularity as disease models they are a footnote. They're so infrequently used that the average survey of animal models of human disease will mention them only in passing, at best. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/21/15821

Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ They are no more carriers of diseases that we're vulnerable to than cattle or chickens.

[ceejayoz]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/06/coronavirus-wo...

> “The primary risks for future spillover of zoonotic diseases are deforestation of tropical environments and large-scale industrial farming of animals, specifically pigs and chickens at high density,” says the disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie of Emory University in the US, an expert reviewer of the report.

[delichon]

> Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/

This article doesn't include a comparative risk assessment. Why are you confident that pigs and chickens have a similar risk? Do you think that the idea that we are more at risk from more similar animals is mistaken?

I imagine that the risks are very different in the modern factory farming context compared to when we lived intermingled with our livestock. The disease risk may be more in the animal behavior than its physiology, for instance if pigs are more friendly or curious or dirtier than chickens or cows, or if their shit is less solid. Or if their wallows are disease reservoirs.

[graemep]

Modern storage and cooking reduces a lot of risks too.