[mx_03]

> It has been estimated as little as 5% of elephants ultimately succumb to cancer, compared to 25% of humans.

That's a scary percentage. And probably will increase if we dont radically change our life style and status quo

[gus_massa]

Probably a lot of elephants die to infections because they don't have antibiotics, or famine or poaching or the flu or a lot of other causes that we reduced.

[AndrewDucker]

It's so high because we eradicated so many other things that used to kill us off early.

Looking at the leading causes of death in the UK[1] they're: dementia, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, flu. If you lowered any of those then the rates of the others would go up.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

[SirFatty]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure elephants don't consume a lot of Red 40, ultra processed food, and PFAS and PFOA. Well, not yet anyway.

[robertlagrant]

Also they didn't innovate their ways out of lots of other types of death, making cancer proportionately larger.