Since I became an adult, the list of things that I feel fairly confident will never happen to me has grown with each passing year: I will never win the lottery (I don’t buy tickets) or become a famous archaeologist (dreamed but never trained), but neither will I die while skydiving (no one can make me skydive) or have to worry about rabies.
When I was young, rabies was a big concern — as a child I was warned, repeatedly, to never approach a strange dog if I didn’t want to endure the excruciating pain of dozens of injections, delivered by a footlong needle, right in my stomach. When I first saw the scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” in which Atticus shoots a mad dog, I could only hope my own father would be able to do the same.
But by the 1970s, as the canine rabies vaccine became widely available and increasingly mandatory, that scene and all its implications slipped toward the anachronistic.
Until my husband found one of our dogs gazing down at a grounded bat on our back patio the other night.
To be honest, our first reaction was dog-owner chagrin. Harley is a rescue hound, of indeterminate but clearly mixed breed, who is given to leaping in the air to snap at moths and making vain but enthusiastic attempts to catch lizards. My husband’s assumption that Harley had brought down this bat seemed questionable — the dog never actually catches the moths — but my sympathy was definitely with the bat, which appeared stunned.
Being very careful not to touch it, my husband moved the squeaking critter to a dog-free zone, in the hopes it would just flap away. Alas, it was dead the next morning. (Here is where I admit our first mistake — we should have simply put a box or bucket over the bat and called animal control.)
Harley is in quarantine for 30 days after an encounter with a rabid bat.
(Mary Mcnamara / Los Angeles Times)
As luck would have it, Harley had a vet appointment that very day, and so I casually mentioned the bat. The vet didn’t actually freeze, but she certainly used a very no-nonsense voice when she asked: “Did you bring the bat? We need the bat.”
Of course they needed the bat. Why hadn’t I thought to bring the bat? I live in the foothills where bear, bobcat and mountain lion sightings break up the tedium of coyote and raccoon encounters. I know that bats are potential rabies carriers, yet somehow I did not connect this with my own backyard.
I felt very stupid, especially when the vet informed me that, though only a small percentage of bats carry the disease, more than a few have been found in nearby Burbank and Glendale. A quick Google search revealed the L.A. County rabid bat map, which, on that day, listed 33 infected bats encountered during this year alone.
I (again very carefully) brought the bat to the vet’s office, which in turn shipped it to the county’s public veterinary health department. More, and increasingly panicked, online research reacquainted me with the horror of the disease, which is pretty much 100% fatal in all unvaccinated dogs and those unvaccinated humans who do not receive treatment before becoming symptomatic — just last year, a Fresno woman died from rabies after being bitten by a bat that she was trying to remove from her classroom.
Also its history. Turns out, rabid-dog attacks were a pretty big problem in L.A. until the Southern California Veterinary Medical Assn. began offering public vaccination clinics in 1958. According to the county public health website, the last locally acquired infection in a dog occurred 10 years later.
Vaccinations work; what a concept.
Harley, who recently turned 1, was already up to date on all his shots — the trip to the vet had been to get the next round, including a rabies booster. The vet, and then a very nice doctor with the county, reassured me that even if the bat turned out to be infected, there was virtually no chance of Harley getting sick.
I also learned that even an unvaccinated dog, or cat, can be protected if they are vaccinated quickly after an encounter with an animal carrying rabies.
So when the bat results came back positive — there are now 37 encounters listed on the map, including ours and three other new ones — I did not collapse in fear that my beloved dog would die.
“Out of an abundance of caution,” (the county official’s words) we are required to keep Harley in quarantine from other dogs (except his best buddy Koda, our border collie mix who’s also in lockdown) for 30 days. During this time we should monitor him for symptoms and give him loads of hugs because he is the best dog ever, and we could not bear to lose him. (OK, that last bit is not part of the official protocol, but we’re doing it anyway.)
We also had to fill out several forms and send in copies of his vaccination certificates as well as his photo. The county quickly distributed leaflets throughout the neighborhood, warning residents that a rabid bat had been found near the cross streets of our house and providing information of what to do if you find an ailing or dead bat in or near your house. (Which is how I learned that we should have covered the poor thing with a box or bucket and called animal control.)
All of this raised my personal anxiety level but was generally reassuring: L.A. County is very serious about preventing a resurgence of rabies.
With vaccinations of all kinds currently under siege, including among pet owners, I offer this story as a reminder: Rabies, like many other terrible diseases, still exists and can appear in your life when you least expect it.
My kids have never worried about meeting up with mad dogs (or whether their father would be able to shoot them) because they, and we, are privileged to live in a time when science has eradicated a fatal threat that was ubiquitous less than 60 years ago.
That luxury has, I fear, made us forgetful. Just as the success of other vaccines has lulled too many people to falsely believe that they need not fear measles or COVID-19 or, God help us, polio, the long absence of rabies gave me a false sense of security. I did not view that bat as a peril until I was reminded, by medical professionals and government officials, to do so.
In other words, I had never personally encountered rabies so I thought I never would. And then I did.
Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
