Do Animals get Cancer?

[jimmydasaint]

I didn't know where to post this Thread but the main point is: Do animals get cancer in their natural habitats in fewer numbers than humans? If not, what are the factors that cause the decreased rate of cancer?

[Mokele]

Most wild animals don't regularly get cancer, and the big protective factor is 'getting killed by something else first'.

 

In captivity, or when they live long enough, all animals species can get cancer, though it's very uncommon in ectotherms (simply because they accumulate less cellular damage).

[dttom]

They actually should have the potential to get cancer if our til-now understanding of cancer is rational. Also, experimental mice could get cancer otherwise they would have no value in cancer research study. So this potential is confirmed but if they do freqently get one in nature, it seems not to be the case as this disease grew popular together with the increase in lifespan of human. Hence probably it is not a freqent case in nature.

[Mr Skeptic]

Naked mole rats however are very resistant to cancer. They have an extra gene for contact inhibition. Animals generally don't have to worry about cancer because they don't generally live long enough for it to be likely.

[CharonY]

More precisely, they have an additional regulatory mechanism, triggering contact inhibition.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I had a housecat that had cancer.

[jimmydasaint]

Thanks for the reply guys, and Capn I empathise with you, I also had a pet cat that died on me and I wanted no other pet after it. However, I was considering diet as a major contributory factor to avoidance of cancer in 'wild' animals and as an important factor in human cancers. In short, animals do not tend to eat highly processed foods, and I then wondered if humans that cut out all processed foods would avoid problems with a metabolically screwed up diet?

[swansont]

Most wild animals don't regularly get cancer, and the big protective factor is 'getting killed by something else first'.

 

In captivity, or when they live long enough, all animals species can get cancer, though it's very uncommon in ectotherms (simply because they accumulate less cellular damage).

 

I think this is a concept that gets easily lost — we have seen "new" diseases or increases in cases of diseases, which are often blamed on recent lifestyle excesses. But some of the "new" ones probably aren't new at all. We just didn't see them very often before the advent of modern medicine and the longer lifetimes that resulted. "People didn't used to die of X" may simply be that they generally died of something else before X would tend to manifest itself. Surviving (or not getting) a heart attack at 50 means those statistics go down, but some other statistic has to go up, because everybody dies.