I’ve been reading so much about rabies and cats and there are so few cat owners who keep their cats up to date on rabies vaccinations and buds please keep your kitty’s jabs up-to-date and please please please keep your cats inside and please treat any cat with an unknown vaccination history as a wild animal and don’t try to touch it or pet it or catch it.
The most recent survivor of the Milwaukee protocol is an 8 year old girl who contacted rabies through scratches from feral cats that lived in a colony at her school.
Don’t touch strange cats even if they’re friendly, and teach your kids not to touch strange cats either. (For that matter teach your kids not to touch strange dogs either, but decades of stray eradication and mandatory vaccines means that the US is one of the few places in the world where cats are more likely to be rabid than dogs)
Also did you know that there’s one case of transplant-acquired rabies recorded in the US? The recipient got a kidney from a donor who died in an accident and nobody was aware the donor had rabies. The recipient died of rabies, which is a bit of an extreme flavor of graft failure if you ask me. Terrifying!
Anyway. If you, too, want to have nightmares about rabies you can search my website (www.ms-demeanor.com) for “keep your fucking cat indoors” and scroll to the section on rabies and read some nightmare fuel (like the case report on the family that moved across 3 states with their 13 barn cats, unaware that one was incubating rabies).
Did you know that in 1994, 665 people in New Hampshire had to be given post exposure prophylaxis for rabies because of one infected kitten that had contact with a racoon before being brought to a pet store?
The only way animals are tested for rabies is to examine their brain tissue. The animal is killed in order to do this. If your pet is exposed to rabies they stand a much, much, much better chance of being quarantined instead of being euthanized for testing if you have kept their vaccinations current.
Please keep your pets’ vaccinations up to date, and please keep your cat indoors. There’s a risk of exposure even for indoor cats, so make sure they’ve got their shots.
Hi, I’m an Australian living in Ireland. I’ve never lived in a country that has rabies. Keep your cats indoors.
Even in countries that don’t have rabies there’s FIV, FeLV, panleukopaenia, dogs, and fucking cars. Even in countries that don’t have rabies, outdoor cats kill wildlife at a devastating pace without you even knowing about it. Even in countries without rabies, cats displace native small carnivores. Even in countries without rabies, displacement by and/or interbreeding with domestic cats drives native wildcat species to extinction. Even in countries without rabies, other carnivores opportunistically prey on cats. Even in countries without rabies, so-called working cats kill more wildlife than they do mice and rats. Even in countries without rabies cats can get lost or severely injured or kidnapped or go feral. Even in countries without rabies the average lifespan of an outdoor cat is about 3 years vs about 15 indoors.
Hope this helps :)
The person who made these tags lived in Scotland, which is home to a critically endangered wildcat that is susceptible to diseases spread by domestic cats that are allowed to roam, so in this case domestic cats are an even more direct threat to native small predators than usual.
