strangebiology:

willoftzeentch:

shychemist:

dawnsmoke:

ofcarnivora:

A wolf skull with bone pathology due to a tumor.

(source: taxidermy.net)

This just makes me sad. Nature is so toxic now that it’s causing tumours in wildlife?

Cancer is a byproduct of biology. This is nothing new. Cancer and tumours are not exclusive to humans nor have they ever been.

See the Tasmanian Devil for example.

Its just much more prevalent in humans because of our healthcare advances; we live long enough for a lot of people to have a decent chance of contracting it.

Also most cancers that animals have you’d never know unless it had a physical effect as bone cancer has on the skull.

Cancer is a biological inevitability. Every time your cells reproduce there’s the tiny chance there will be a mistake in the regulation of this. Since your cells reproduce billions upon billions of times statistically if you lived long enough everyone would get cancer at some point.

I think the problem with how we’re taught about cancer is that instead of teaching how it actually happens, schools and the media tend to focus on things that increase the odds of developing cancer by damaging the DNA or cell regulation - things like radiation or certain toxins like those found in cigarettes. All these things do are increase the likelihood of you developing cancer, but they don’t create the possibility from scratch. Cancer is always something that can potentially and spontaneously happen no matter what you or the wolf up there are or aren’t exposed to.

People like to blame cancer on random things that we do. Check out the dailymailoncology project, that documents the Daily Mail’s limitless classification of pretty much everything as something that causes cancer and/or something that prevents it. 

The main reason more people are dying of cancer these days is that more people are living long enough to get it.