The Walking Dead: Dead City just settled a big question—can animals become infected?

While The Walking Dead: Dead City is in its second season, it has now widened its focus to include not just human survivors.

Recently, an episode featured Maggie and Hershel encountering a dreadful new danger - a giant bear that seemed to move like a walker. The encounter made fans re-examine everything they thought they understood about the show's virus lore: At what stage is the Wildfire Virus now? Is it possible for them to be infected? Well, no, the virus can only affect humans.

The encounter with the bear wasn’t just eerie due to its blows and stalks. From afar, one could tell that its body was bruised and heavily scarred. Unlike the ambling dead, though, this creature roared, bled, and howled in pain. It was gory in life. Its existence alone contradicted the franchise’s greatest rule, creating a paramount form of tension that has long persisted.

The strain was deliberately added. The Walking Dead has avoided the notion of undead animals for a long time, yet this moment brilliantly reignited the conversation. Amid all the chaos and action, the episode slyly pushed the audience to wonder if the infection's boundaries are evolving. After all, if human offshoots are now surgically changing, what’s to stop the same with animals?

The virus still plays by old rules

No matter how the scene was set, there’s no concrete proof that the bear was infected. Everything we understand from the main series and its spin-offs corroborates that the Wildfire Virus solely impacts human physiology.

From Dr. Jenner’s research at the CDC to the remarks made by franchise founder Robert Kirkman, the science regarding the virus is straightforward: it hijacks an individual’s brain, depopulates them, and then brings a body back to life in a state where only automatic movements can be performed. That cycle has not been documented in any animals.

Even during critical events such as animal attacks, like Ezekiel’s tiger, Shiva, or the ailing horse in season 10, there was no transformation. These creatures passed away, but did not come back. The inter-species leap is not possible with this virus.

This is not a mistake either, Kirkman has bluntly noted that for the entire franchise, animal zombies are banned, further cementing the notion that the virus is a distinctly human affliction. Therefore, even though the bear in question appeared and behaved in a disturbingly walker-like fashion, its aggression was purely primal, devoid of any viral influence.

Nature is still dangerous, even without infection, in The Walking Dead

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This episode's brilliance emerges from the thin boundary it creates between a walker and a wild animal. The overgrown remains of Central Park likely housed the bear's former zoo. As food sources shrank and human territories encroached further into its space, the creature may have regarded Maggie and Hershel as meal options. The bear's strange actions, coupled with his scars, suggest not infection, but rather a hardened being forged by a dying ecosystem.

The moment also reinforces an awful truth that is often neglected with the raging undead: the world is being reclaimed by nature, and it does not need to be infected to be frightening. That bear fight served as a reminder to the audience that in The Walking Dead: Dead City, walkers may be the main featured menace, but they're not the only threat. Undead animals may not be within reach for fans anytime soon, but the series has no shortage of more realistic—and lethal—horror.

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