You know how, if you eat infected cow meat, you can get Mad Cow Disease? It's known as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans. And it's something that we in the lab are VERY paranoid about. It's caused by prions, tiny proteins in the brain, and it's virtually unkillable. They also aren't sure how it's spread. So if I come into contact with the nervous system tissue of an infected person, I could theoretically get it just being in the same room with it, so little is known about prions.
Well, I have a friend in pharma research who read something terrifying lately. It seems that an unusually large number of people who are working with animal models of neurodegenerative diseases are coming down with those same diseases themselves. The implications of this are staggering- it means prions could be causing all kinds of things, and just exposure to animal CNS/PNS tissue is enough to be a risk factor.
Which is all just a way of saying, just because something is "animal" doesn't mean it can't affect us, and in ways we might not even realize, let alone in the ways we can see- like economically, as you pointed out.