Jeez criminy. Do squirrels get rabies?

Factual Questions
1

An hour ago, I decided it was lunchtime and that I would make some leftover chicken into chicken salad. Then I had to find the celery to put with it, and finding the celery involved going out to my car (sigh. It’s hard being me.) When my upper half emerged from the trunk of the car (no celery there) I saw a tiny brown thing hopping towards me. It was a baby squirrel–furry but still skinny-looking and with really evil front teeth. It was chirping threateningly. And it kept hopping RIGHT AT ME.

I did the only thing an educated primate could do when faced with four ounces of angry fluff–I screamed like a little girl and ran inside.

My question is, was it just too young to know that things that are hundreds of times bigger than it is should be avoided, or was there something wrong with it?

My ego is hurt. It actually continued chasing me, right back into the house.

2

IIRC, any mammal can get rabies. The most recent rabies death in Marin County (California) was a veterinarian who was bitten by a horse.

w.

3

shakes with laughter

I think it wanted the celery.

4

Any mammal can get rabies, but small prey animals (like the squirrel you mentioned) are eaten before they can pass it on, or die of the injuries given by the (rabid) predator.

It could be just a young thing not knowing better. It could have other things wrong with it, but not just rabies (and that is unlikely).

5

Not quite.

Rabies is all but unknown in Possums.

6

Squirrels, rats, mice etc. can technically get rabies but they don’t enough for anyone to seriously get worried about. They just aren’t good carriers for it because they are unlikely to survive whatever gave it to them, become contagious themselves, and then find a way to pass it on to something else like a human. It could happen but the chances are very slim.

7

I asked the same question last summer
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=384994&
The answer was, yes they can, but it really doesn’t happen enough to be concerned about.

8

The squirrels around here often seem to be cursing out whatever disturbs them. They will find a position of relative safety, such as part way up a tree, and then turn back and chatter away for a few seconds, before continuing on their way. I’ve seen them do this at cats, dogs, humans, even cars that drive by.
Perhaps the squirrel in your garage felt cornered, most animals will take an aggressive stance if they feel their escape route is cut off.

9

Don’t have a garage. This all happened in my driveway, less than ten feet away from several lovely tall trees.

Surely the little guy was too small to be on his own? I wonder if he fell out of a nest in one of those trees. He barely looked like a squirrel, really.

10

Yes, but not likely. Dudes feed squirrels, thus squirrels lose their fear of humans.

But ground squirrels *do *carry the Black Plague.

11

Your question is best asked: “Do squirrels transmit rabies” because that is your concern. The answer is, “Not so far” at least to the best of my knowledge.

The rabies virus can probably survive in any mammal. For unknown reasons (some postulates are upthread) small rodents have not been documented to transmit rabies to humans. Larger rodents (beavers, e.g.) do get reported with rabies. I can see where an eager beaver animal lover could get rabies from befriending a diseased beaver or woodchuck or something big that had rabies.

If regular rats and tree rats (aka “squirrels”) were a significant vector, we’d probably all be in trouble.

The correct response in your case is still to kill the tree rat, of course. If it’s that dangerous as a baby, it’s gonna take out an adult human when it’s growed up. I saw a home video about a guy with a squirrel up his pant leg once…oh–sorry–off topic.

In the back of my rapidly aging mind I vaguely recall Cecil addressing this back in the 80’s. If I recall his answer was not entirely accurate although he defended it by saying squirrels could in theory carry rabies or something like that…this might be technically true but there are a lot of these pests around and no one’s been reported to get rabies from them, and there have been a lot of contacts, and rabies is very reportable, so practically speaking, “No; you won’t get rabies from a squirrel.”

12

If small mammals have trouble transmitting rabies, why are bats the usual culprits?

13

You keep your celery in your car?

14

I have two disturbing squirrel storries.

Once I saw a squirrel in my backyard that had completely gone bonkers. It was running all over the place making lots of noise. It did that until it died. It got caught in a bush and couldn’t free itself. Something was clearly wrong with this squirrel from the begining. This was a sick squirrel rabies or not.

The second was even more disturbing. I was walking from my car to my apartment when I noticed a squirrel in the bushes. It had something that it really wanted. I’m pretty sure it was eating it. As I got closer I saw what it was. It was another dead squirrel, and it was definitely being eaten by the other squirrel. I didn’t think they were predators at all much less canibals.

15

For a few reasons. First, bats have an extremely low rate of rabies, less than 0.5% of bats in the wild. They do have trouble transmitting the disease, bats are small and relatively fragile, most rabid animals that bite them will kill them, but not always.

I think the reasons bats are the most common transmitters of rabies are the following reasons:

-People have a general awareness of how rabid dogs and other such animals act, and stay away from these mammals when it is clear they have rabies, these animals quickly get reported to animal control and destroyed

-Most mammalian pets that can get rabies are vaccinated and don’t live in the wild, so have less opportunity to get the disease (if they aren’t vaccinated) or to transmit it.

-People have very little direct, hand-to-hand experience with bats. I have a bat house near my home that I put up because I like having swarms of bats around (no, seriously, they eat an obscene number of insects, the brown bats in my bat house eat something like 6,000 mosquitoes per bat per night.) Yet, I’ve never touched a bat, had a bat in my home, or had one get really close. Unlike birds bats tend to not be around during the day, and they don’t tend to walk around your porch like some birds do.

-Because bats are an oddity, when people get the chance to interact with one closely, they may not behave appropriately. A child may try to pick up a downed bat. Any bat that is on the ground during the day has something wrong with it, many such bats are the small portion of bats that have rabies.

-If a rat or mouse gets rabies, it’s still limited by the fact that they can’t fly, meaning even if they’re in the home, they’re unlikely to be able to bite you if you’re sleeping in a bed raised from the ground. Bats on the other hand, when they spread rabies, often do so when they bite someone in their sleep. The person may never even see the bat or realize they’ve been bitten. This ability to fly is probably why not every bat who is attacked by a rabid animal dies, even if wounded, as long as they can still fly away, they can flee most predators.

16

Also, most people who die from rabies got the disease from rabid dogs (worldwide.) In the United States rabies is so rare because of widespread animal vaccination that most transmissions are from bats, but it’s still only a few cases per year.

17

Small rodents have this trouble: bats are not rodents. Genetically closer to primates.

18

Bats (mammalian order chiroptera) are by far the commonest vector for human rabies in the United States, accounting for something like 3/4 of all cases since 1990.

Scary, huh?..except that there are only 2 or 3 cases of human rabies/year.

Small rodents are not a vector for rabies.

Small members of the rat and squirrel family (technically the rat and squirrel order, I guess…rodentia) and rabbits (lagomorphs) are not vectors for rabies and have not been reported to be a cause of rabies in humans.

Compared to rats and squirrels bats are way cooler animals and they also eat mosquitoes, which drive me crazy, so take good care of them. Don’t touch a sick one. Unlike rodentia, they deserve to live. Rabbits and stuff are also fairly benign and probably deserve to live except if they get into my garden plus that one in Monty Python.

19

  1. Anyone who keeps their celery in their car is probably not the most reliable judge of whether the behavior of another animal is “weird” or not. :wink:

  2. No doubt Teenage Mutant Ninja Squirrel was influenced by his environment, like all immature mammals. The mercentary tree shrews’ recruitment videos are loaded with violence, for example. Or perhaps he recently read I Attacked President Peanut, by Ninja Swamp Rabbit.

20

I was attacked and bitten by a squirrel once. I was sitting on a park bench having lunch, and at some point I let my arm hang straight down with a slice of apple in my hand. The next thing I knew, there was a sharp pain in my hand, and I dropped the apple, and out of the corner of my eye I see a squirrel acampering away with my apple. My finger was bleeding. Little fucker had bit me to get my food.

I called my doctor, who told me there hadn’t been a case of rabies in the area in 40 years or more, so don’t worry. She did have me come in for a tetanus shot – I’m not even sure if that was a real worry, or she just thought I was agitated enough that giving me a shot would make me feel better.