Question: Humans have the tendency to get [certain prion diseases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)) when eating human flesh. It's known animals can get [prion diseases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy) as well.

Does cannibalism among other animal species also make them more susceptible to get a prion disease, and are there distinctions between mammals doing so and other orders like reptiles, birds, fish etc.?

Answer: 
An individual (animal or human) acquires a prion disease when they consume meat that contains prions (proteins that are mishapen enough to drastically change their functionality), which subsequently causes proteins within the individual to misfold into the same shape as the prion, resulting in a whole slew of problems. 

**As of right now, there is little knowledge of where prions come from/how they're formed. Also, there is little knowledge of how inter-species infections/transmissions occur.** Researchers are currently investigating various combinations of inter-species transmissions, such as humans eating infected horse meat, or cats eating infected chicken meat, but still know only very little about this phenomenon.

To say which species have higher rates of prion disease when looking at a cannibalist communities within that species, I don't think we're anywhere near close to making those conclusions, and the same goes for inter-species transmissions.

All the best.
Dr. Dean O'Del was on radio with a syndicated health show in the 1990s during the BSE/Mad Cow scares, where he cautioned that the use of bone meal on roses or plants as the heat of making bone meal did not destroy the prions until it was burnt to charcoal carbon.

Given scant evidence for grass from contaminated soil might also have the prions in the grass for how sheep might get and transmit it, lowering the odds of eating prions still would require a totally plant based diet given the vast numbers of animals mixed into processed meat products like Pink Slime and deviled meat or ham, & a organic diet given that, only a spontaneous and rare mis-folded protein would start the 40 year incubation towards Alzheimer's and vCJV.

Both scrapie and CWD can be acquired simply by consuming infected soil or grazing on grass containing it. This is most likely the most common way that these prion diseases are acquired naturally--not cannibalism at all, or at least not the sort we commonly think of! It's a simple fecal-oral route of transmission, albeit one with an alarmingly long potential incubation period.