I also find this weirdly dubious, but not impossible. I do know that to study human coronavirus in mice, we had to create a mouse line expressing the human ACE2

I also find this weirdly dubious, but not impossible. I do know that to study human coronavirus in mice, we had to create a mouse line expressing the human ACE2 protein. I just did a quick protein alignment and the %sequence identity between human and select animals are: Bats: 81.5% Mice: 81.9% Dogs: 84.1% Cats: 85.2%