Technically, yes, I suppose birdfeeders count. But mostly I stupidly mixed up the chief protagonists in this discussion, and mistook you with your “aid” to Nature for Musicat putting out chow for deer and hand-feeding raccoons. Sorry 'bout that.
The State of Wisconsin seems to think differently.
http://dhfs.wisconsin.gov/communicable/factsheets/Rabies.htm
You make a wallet, that when you stroke it, turns into a suitcase. 
very very old joke.
Mother told me to never post in the pit, but one case in 2000 and the previous in 1959 isn’t rare?
That’s in humans; most humans bit by rabid animals get the injections before the disease takes hold, so they don’t count towards the total. Rabies is not in any way, shape, or form rare in wild animals in Wisconsin.
This past winter, when ranchers in northern NM were air-dropping hay to cattle caught in upper pasture after some major snow, the local news did a piece on some people dropping hay right by the freeway for freaking antelope.
So then we had dozens of wild and already healthy and happy antelope posing a road hazard.
Wild animals native to certain habitats are, like, duh, adapted to those habitats. :rolleyes:
I suppose that “some regularity” constitutes “not very rare” but it is a numerical argument and one could ask for numbers in a cite. 
At any rate, my concern would be human cases.
In Wisconsin, skunks and bats are the most likely animals to carry the rabies virus, although rabies also has occurred with some regularity in dogs, cats, foxes, raccoons and livestock.
But like I said, human cases only occur when people don’t get treated after a bite, which isn’t common at all in very developed countries and where there is access to rabies treatments. And anyway, since rabid humans are not real likely to transmit, they shouldn’t really be a matter of concern. My husband was bit by what turned out to be a rabid dog, but he isn’t listed as a human case of rabies because he got treated, and so never developed it. It should be of more interest that a case of rabies popped up in a suburban, family-owned dog, rather than the lack of another case of human rabies.
The count on that page excludes the one amazing case from 2004 in Wisconsin where an untreated rabid bite on a human caused rabies but - through lots of intense medical intervention - the person survived.
Plus to confirm that an animal is rabid, you have to trap it and behead it, then send in the brain for testing. (Typically for a pet dog claimed by its family, they will quarantine the animal for an extended period of time and observe it for symptoms, but the bitten person still needs to start treatment ASAP.) That means that there are lots of cases of wild animals out there who left after biting and were not captured for testing, so any numbers out there are basically from whatever they can manage to capture. (Unless you actually get a human who doesn’t receive treatment, in which case they can test the virus’s type to see which animal it typically comes from.)
The Wikipedia article on rabies mentions that a new variant of the virus primarily infecting raccoons is moving from the eastern seaboard of the US towards the Midwest - it’s not in Wisconsin yet but I suspect it won’t take that long. The article states that raccoons currently make up 50% of the documented (i.e., caught and tested) rabies cases in the US, though skunks are for now the primary vector animal in the Midwest.
There was an article about her in a recent issue of Scientific American, absolutely fascinating story (plus she’s cute, too).
Rabies can apparently infect any warm blooded animal-- I seem to recall but cannot just now find a cite for a CDC statistic recording at least one pigeon that tested positive. However, mammals, especially predatory mammals, are by far the most common carriers.
The Wisconsin girl’s case is extraordinary because it is apparently the only instance of a human surviving a symptomatic case of the disease. This for a disease that kills roughly 50,000 people a year worldwide. Of course, as noted in earlier posts, these are symptomatic cases. Rabies *exposure * is treated by prophylaxis through the administration of a series of treatments by injection, before symptoms develop. Rabies may also be prevented by vaccination. Pre-exposure rabies vaccines are commercially produced for dogs, cats, ferrets, and humans. (We use one for our staff.)
Rabies in raccoons is particularly frightening because raccoons can be asymptomatic carriers-- able to transmit the disase but never develop clinical symptoms themselves. Thus there is no ‘quarantine period’ for a raccoon that has bitten a person (or a domestic animal). Bats and skunks apparently may also be asymptomatic carriers. Any bite or scratch by such an animal, regardless of its apparent state of health, must be treated as a rabies exposure. If the animal can be identified, caught, tested, and determined to be negative, prophylaxis may be unnecessary. Otherwise it is mandatory.
Since no manufactirer of rabies vaccine labels its product as safe and effective in raccoons, the ‘vaccination by bait distribution’ system is inherently flawed. It may indeed confer some degree of immunity to some number of animals (raccoons being the usual target) and thus may somewhat reduce the incidence of rabies in wild populations in some places for some interval of time. However, the “some” repeated in all the above remains an undetermined variable. Not all individuals will eat the bait, not all who eat it will obtain immunity, immunity lasts for varying lengths of time, and an asymptomatic carrier that eats the bait will remain an asymptomatic carrier. Thus rabies can never be discounted as a significant threat to humans, domestic animals, and livestock, whatever its incidence in wild populations.
As I said before, rabies (and several other zoonotic diseases carried by raccons) scares the crap out of me-- justifiably, I believe.
Actually, I once saw a river otter rip the left cheek off of an animal curator at the aquarium I used to work at. They are nasty, agressive, brutal creatures. Not unlike racoons
Horses can get rabies too – in Wisconsin, no less. All the horses in the barn where I board my Thoroughbred are vaccinated regularly for it. No one with any sense around here would go near a raccoon that wasn’t afraid, in fact, we’re warned that wildlife willing to approach humans rather than flee are possibly rabid.
A few years ago we had an upsurge in rabies (perhaps from the new strain noted to have originated on the East Coast?) that decimated the raccoon population here in Massachusetts. But now they’re bouncing back and the coons I see are alive or roadkill, rather than pathetic corpses (or feebly twitching near-corpses) of rabies victims.
I guess I’m just a cockeyed optimist but I really thought that by now everyone had gotten the word that it’s a bad idea to feed wild animals.
A few years ago we had two or three coyotes that hung around our golf course feeding on the rabbits. Then people started to feed them. They got so bold that they would come up to you and practically demand food. Coyotes aren’t very big but I’ll tell you it’s a little unnerving to have one come within 6 ft. of you and glare at you because you’re not providing the treat it has grown to expect from an animal of your type.
The course is on a navy base and eventually the navy trapped them and released them up in the surrounding mountains. We still have a few around but there has been enough game out on the surrounding desert that they are rarely seen on the course. However, with the dry weather I expect they will soon be back.
Dude, you already won the thread. Overachiever.
David, people were feeding coyotes? I thought we were living in a day and age when people didn’t do the incredibly stupid stuff they used to do, like taking pictures of their kids feeding wild black bears, but obviously not. A coyote is a top predator, and they’re not that small. Yikes.
Impressive, aren’t we?
Hey, are you going to eat that sandwich?
Careful, he bought it at the ACME foodcourt.
Dammit, don’t those idiots realize they’re screwing up the breeding program? If we start treating coyotes nicely, they’ll have no more need to keep getting more and more clever - and where does the program to see if we can breed sentience into a non-tool using species go then?
Continue the experiments with GWBush.
Geez, where were you people when I was arguing with my wife about feeding the raccoons in our back yard? I tried every argument I could think of (including the one that she was spending too much money), but CannyDan’s post would have done the job.
However, Qadgop is right. They are cute!
I do wish the bastards who are building in my area, displacing so many animals and forcing them into folks backyards were met with such vehemence.