-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email When it comes to the bird flu outbreak, a lot of attention has been placed on cows and, of course, birds — but they’re not the only animals getting infected with the H5N1 virus. Cats are increasingly at the center of this growing public health crisis, which is especially concerning given they drink milk at dairy farms and eat birds and mice, which have recently been reported as reservoirs for the virus. When cats die from bird flu, it can be grisly.

They experience fever, loss of appetite and severe respiratory and neurological symptoms that are unpleasant and painful. As reported in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Emerging Infectious Diseases journal , more than half of cats around the first Texas dairy farm to test positive for bird flu this spring died after drinking raw milk from the infected cows. "The cats were found dead with no apparent signs of injury and were from a resident population of [approximately] 24 domestic cats that had been fed milk from sick cows," the scientists wrote.

“Clinical disease in cows on that farm was first noted on March 16; the cats became sick on March 17, and several cats died in a cluster during March 19–20.” Related The chicken and egg problem of fighting another flu pandemic H5N1 has been known to exist in birds since 1996, but the current situation really started to ramp up around 2021, killing hundreds of millions of them around the world in just a few years. It has al.