After the monthly meeting of the model car club, as we were standing out in the parking lot BS-ing, one of the guys said, “This is your car? I thought you had a little blue sports thingie.”
I told him I couldn’t drive it because my cat caught a bat.
…and then I had to explain. About nine weeks ago, Sabrina, our outdoor cat, left us another little corpse on the doorstep. Mrs. R disposed of it without thinking much about it; but a week later I got to thinking.
Why would a cat be able to catch a bat? Because the bat was sick? Uh-oh.
So it turns out that the county has rules: If your cat’s been exposed to a rabid bat, you have to quarantine it for six months. Since the corpse is long gone, we can’t have it tested, so the county says you have to assume the worst. So Sabrina’s spending the winter in our nice warm dry garage. Where the Miata is. And I can’t open the garage door, or she’ll get out.
Anyway, it’s not as grim as all that. The Internet says that most cases appear in four to six weeks, and we’re well past that and she’s fine. And the doctor at County Animal Control said that of twenty bats they’ve examined this year, only one was rabid, and that cats could catch perfectly healthy bats. So we’re pretty optimistic here; I’ll be astonished if anything bad happens.
And Sabrina seems content to be in the garage. I suspect she’s a bit bored; but she gets lots of special time with Mrs. R, so that’s good.
Spending time with Sabrina: If she were to scratch me or Mrs. R, there would be a chance of rabies transmission. But apparently it’s only contagious near the end, so what you do is wait ten days; if the cat’s still alive, you’re okay. If she dies (how cold-blooded I feel, typing this!) you hasten in to the doctor and start getting the rabies series of shots.
The doctor at County said that they can develop symptoms up to six months later, so apparently there’s a science basis for it. But I also suspect that the six months includes a healthy safety margin, which could be fear-based.
apparently not, sailboat. i looked around online, even checked out my health dept here in indiana, thinking you were right about six months being unusual.
nope, the average quarantine appears to be the six months the OP stated. good case in point. vaccinate your beasties even if they aren’t outdoor animals. my two feline overlords are properly vaccinated even tho they’re strictly indoor fat cats.
Of course. I had just overstated the situation to my friend at the meeting for dramatic effect and then thought I might as well share here. Markxxx No, she didn’t have a rabies shot, a massive oversight on our part. You can bet that if she gets out of this okay, she’s going to have one. Oh, and apparently the shots are only good for one to three years (depending on the type), so one would do well to have them re-done occasionally.
In PA, it is state law that all cats and dogs are current on their rabies vaccine. When we had an outdoor cat years ago (she was semi-feral and letting her out for a couple of hours a day was the only way she didn’t go crazy). We made sure she was regularly de-wormed and up to date on all vaccines. Eventually she got used to indoor life that all she wanted to do was go and sleep in the sun on the deck for the afternoon. She was hard as all hell to catch and put in a crate to take to the vet, but I wasn’t chancing her encountering a rabid animal and catching anything.
You can have her vaccinated now, no need to wait until the 6 month quarantine is over.
The county’s rules seem to be very specific, and the vet wants to follow them exactly: A month before the end of quarantine, she’s to have a vaccination.
Your cat is lucky. Where I live, if your pet is exposed to rabies and they have been vaccinated, they are quarantined until proven healthy. If they haven’t been vaccinated, they’re euthanized and tested.
This particular vet’s office is set up so that Sabrina wouldn’t have a chance to bite any other animals. Rabies is apparently only transmissible via blood or saliva (although I did read about some cavers who apparently caught it by inhaling aerosolized bat urine :eek: ), so she’d have to be in pretty close proximity to another animal and behaving aggressively, like clawing or biting, to transmit.
And her normal demeanor is not very aggressive. If she were suddenly aggressive, that would be a sign that she had rabies, and so she wouldn’t be getting a vaccination. (I’m not ready to think about how to euthanize her if that proves to be necessary )
In my research on this, I’ve found two cases where in this was the supposed method of transmission (though the hypothesis was aerosolized saliva, not urine). In one case, there’s evidence that the infected man was handling bats with his bare hands. In the other case, there’s testimony that the infected man had open sores on his face and neck. In the cave in the second case, it would be nigh impossible not to have dozens of bats contact your face and neck.
It’s damn hard to prove a negative. However, given that all the stories boil down to two cases, that those two cases have alternate explanations for infection, and that AFAIK transmission of rabies by aerosolized saliva has never been replicated in the lab, I’m calling bunk on this one.
However, you can very definitely come down with toxohistoplasmosis by breathing in spores growing in guano.
Back To The Cat
I am a bat lover. My last sighting was of a pair of bats (species unknown they flew away before I could get a look at their nose leaf and ear shapes) mating on the sidewalk. I’m a clumsy human. A good mouser definitely could have caught one.
