# Can every animal get cancer?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-every-animal-get-cancer/968680>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 28, 2022, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-every-animal-get-cancer/968680 "2022-07-28T01:57:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2022, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-every-animal-get-cancer/968680/6 "2022-07-28T03:20:08Z")

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Found an old thread about this:

> [@Is cancer primarily a mammalian disease?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-cancer-primarily-a-mammalian-disease/784033/5):
>
> Cancer, or at least the dysregulated proliferation of cells in some manner, is the natural fate of all multicellular organisms if they live long enough. Even plants get a form of cancer. The remarkable thing is that multicellular life exists at all. For billions of years, all of life was single-celled organisms, and most of it still is. This is a more natural evolutionary state, since every cell may have descendants. As cells compete for survival, every cell has a potential evolutionary fu…

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