Your cat is rabid, MORON

The BBQ Pit
1

Compared to other Pit fare, this may be mild, but it’s fucking annoying and obnoxious to me, and I’m sick and can’t sleep, so why not bitch instead?

Here’s the situation: my friend lives in a house with 4 other guys, all of whom are feckless hippies. They have 3 cats that they let outside. Fine, they’re their cats, none of my business… until I come to pick up my friend and find that one of their cats is bleeding from his tail. Pretty badly, in fact; there’s a several inch long gash with a lot of other wounds, and it looks bad.

Now, being in a band and being feckless hippies, none of these guys has an actual JOB or anything, so how are they going to pay for their poor cat to be seen by a vet? Captain Gullible to the rescue. Yeah, I took their cat to the vet; it had been attacked by another animal and had deep bite wounds all over its tail and back legs. Cost me $200. I was happy to do it for the cat but…

they’d been letting their cats out completely unvaccinated. No rabies, no distemper, no feleuk, no nothing. This wounded kitty could easily have gotten rabies from whatever bit him. He was given a shot and they were told to keep him in the house for 6 months and get the other cats vaccinated pronto.

You guess it-- they did neither. They told me that they could “tell” their cat didn’t have rabies and weren’t worried about it. Both the doctor and I told them rabies can take up to 6 months to manifest. We told them rabies was transmitted from saliva to blood, so the slightest scratch or bite could pass the virus on to the other cats or to them. They did not care, they laughed at me and told me they were “sure” they were safe. They also had the nerve to give me shit about the fact that I don’t let my cats out. Said it was “immoral.” :rolleyes: Look not to the mote in my eye, motherfucker.

Chances are they are not rabid, but every SINGLE day they let those 2 unvaccinated cats outside, they take the chance all over again. They had an opportunity to take their cats to a free rabies shot clinic and blew it off. WHAT the hell is WRONG with these people? Do they not understand how diseases work? They don’t “believe” their cats have rabies… but it’s not a matter of belief, you fucking moron. It’s a fact, and if you get it, you DIE, horribly, possibly taking some of your pals out with you.

Oh yeah, and I have yet to see one red cent of that $200. Yes, I know no good deed goes unpunished, but I couldn’t just let the cat bleed or get septic. I have a conscience (and a solid understanding of microbiology).

I hate those guys. I hope my friend moves out. Fucking dirtbag morons. :mad:

2

Can you pick up all three cats and take them to a no-kill shelter? They’d get the vaccinations that they need and they’d probably get homes with much better people.

I adore my kitties. I can’t imagine not wanting to keep them healthy. And it breaks my heart to hear that other people don’t take that step.

You did a good thing. However, I’d write off that $200. You won’t see any of it again.

Ava

3

Tell them the free rabies shot clinic also has free dope and free munchies.

4

God, avabeth, yes, I am tempted to pick up those kitties and take them away. Those jerks don’t deserve them. The only problem is… catching three cats outside, who may or may not be rabid, is not my idea of a good time. They are sweet, nice cats, but even the best kitties get psycho at the sight of a cat carrier. Also, you never know when one of the guys is going to be home, being that at this point only 2 out of 5 of them are gainfully employed.

wakimika, good one.

5

You did a very kind thing, **Rubystreak. ** Even if they never pay you back, you’ll get the kindness paid back to you in some form by fate. (I firmly believe that good things come to good people.)

That said, I agree with avabeth in spirit about taking them to a shelter, or trying to find them loving homes. Unfortunately, dorks like that would probably just go out and get another bunch of cats if you took the ones they have away from them.

My grandmother’s best friend had a dog which she refused to vaccinate. At one point, the dog was so badly infested with worms that you could see them in his fecal matter. My grandmother tried to show it to her, but the woman refused to believe that the worms were actually worms. It took a very long time (the poor dog came close to death) before grandma managed to convince her to take it to the vet.

The vet wormed the dog, and told her it had myriad problems, one of which was caused by the table-scraps she fed it.

The lady ignored the advice.

The dog died. She got another one.

This woman certainly had no financial constraints. (She’s worth millions.) She also had no qualms about rushing herself or her husband to the doctor at every little twinge. She just refuses to believe that dogs need any medical care.

6

I knew I shouldn’t have opened this thread. Fucking idiots. At least the people who get ther pets one round of vaccines are kinda trying a little bit; they’re doing as much as they know they should do, and most of them are good about getting boosters and such once you explain to them how it works. Ignorance I can deal with and forgive, but willful stupidity and deliberately ignoring the facts is just inexcusable.

This sort of bullshit pisses me off even more than the people who buy purebred dogs and then claim they can’t afford vaccines. I’ll shut up about that, though, before I start frothing at the mouth.

7

How fucking irritating.

One of my schticks when I go into classrooms (part of my job is doing humane education) is to ask the kids this question: “If a hundred people got bitten by a rabid animal, and all one hundred people started showing signs of rabies, how many people out of a hundred would get better?”

The kids almost always start the guessing at 50, and I tell them lower. Soon we’re down at twenty, then ten, then five – and then they’ll either count down by ones, or a bright kid will jump straight to zero, and I nod solemnly at them.

My understanding is that never in history has anyone survived getting rabies, once they started showing signs of the disease; as such, it’s among the deadliest diseases known to humans.

This is NOT something you fuck around with. Rubystreak, there’s a good chance that if you reported these dumbasses to local animal control, they’d be forced either to quarantine their cats or to have the bitten one euthanized and tested for rabies – I know that’s what North Carolina law would dictate. If you need a stick to threaten them with, that might be worth looking into.

Daniel

8

Actually, there has been at least one human who survived full blown rabies (hydrophobia and all), but as far as I know it was just that one.

9

Rabies is quite possibly the scariest disease ever.

It’s also easily prevented, if everybody does their part.

These people who refuse to treat their pets, and people like them, are giving untold others this horrible disease. And all they’d have to do is get their pets to the vet once.

Words fail me.

10

Once a year, you mean. Rabies vaccinations have to be updated. Some places use the newer three-year vaccines, but most still use the yearly ones. Once the vaccination is out of date, the animal is considered unvaccinated and treated accordingly.

11

Actually, according to the CDC, there have been six.

But still, those odds are less than desirable.

12

Cool CDC link. Check out the epidemiology page, it looks like the number of animal cases has been increasing since the 60s.

PerhapsRubysteak should show the deadbeat neighbours a copy of this case study of the most recent rabies related death in America:

Stories like this one make me even more convinced that owners of animals ought to be licensed. Make them pass a test or something before being allowed to own pets.

13

That’s a sig if I ever heard one.

Captain Gullible…TO THE RESCUE!!!

14

If this really bothers your grandmother, she can easily buy dog wormer, put it inside a piece of hamburger, and secretly feed it to that dog next time she visits her friend. Or just toss it into the yard where the dog is at a time when the owner is not home.

Normally, I don’t approve of messing with somebody else’s animals, but when they are being neglected this badly…
P.S. About your statement " a dog which she refused to vaccinate" – I don’t beleive there are any vaccinations that will prevent worms in dogs. That’s a different thing altogether.

15

Once, my wife was over some friends’ house. She called me and said, “You’re not going to believe this one: There’s a bat flying around the living room and it’s attacking people–Friend’s grandmother says it’s trying to get in their hair. Friend’s trying to chase it out by whacking it with a broom. Eek! It was just near me.” I said, “Honey, that bat is rabid. Tell them to call animal control or something right-the-fuck now.” DON’T handle it yourselves. Friends were casual about it. :eek: Dum de dum de dum. . . . Finally they called the police. THE POLICE were casual about it :eek: :eek: The bat eventually left; I forget how.

16

When people say that a bat’s attacking them, they’re usually misreading its confusion as agression. All that bat’s trying to do is GET OUT of the nasty closed space with all the weird earthbound animals in it. While bats do tend to carry rabies, not all bats are rabid. I’ve removed bats from our house myself several times. As long as you take reasonable precautions (e.g., don’t try to catch it with bare hands) your chances of being bitten through the skin are very, very low. Certainly low enough that calling the police to remove a bat from your house will get you laughed at by the dispatcher.

17

Could a person just go out and get a rabies shot? Like my friend, who lives with all these potentially infected cats, could he go to a doctor and explain the situation and get vaccinated so that, just in case one of these kitties gets rabies, he’ll be safe?

18

My husband is a letter carrier for the USPS. Maybe 10 years ago, he was bitten by a rabid pet dog, a Rottweiler mix. The dog was in the house behind a screen door, but broke through it when he sees Mr. Postman come up the walk. It hit my 6’3" and muscular husband in his chest and knocked him on his back. The dog tore at his legs (summertime, so shorts-clad) with its claws, and bit at him - it managed to tear some nice gashes in his legs and salivate over them, but not actually sink teeth in. To get the dog off, he finally kicked it in a front shoulder until he heard the leg snap and/or dislocate. The dog did test rabid, but before that, he had to get the shots for prophylaxis - and at the time it was still multiple shots in the abdomen. (I think the arm version had recently been introduced, but the hospital he was taken to was kind of behind the times.)

After all of that, he only felt pity for the dog. He rightly directed his anger towards the owners, who didn’t get their dog vaccinated, and ended up condemning it to suffer a painful, maddening disease, and an ignoble death. The irresponsible cat owners in the OP - who can’t even take one of their poor cats in when it’s obviously terribly injured - are on their way to the same thing, and have horrible priorities if they condemn someone for keeping inside cats but let one of their own suffer.

19

I’ve always heard that OTC dog wormer can actually hurt more than it can help. Someone once told me that it’s intentionally made weaker so that people won’t overdose their pets, making it only partially effective, and making the surviving worms more resistant.

**

**

Isn’t there a heartworm vaccination?

Anyway, she wouldn’t worm, or vaccinate.

20

For some reason it reminds of Night of the Living Dead. The scene where the mother rufuses to beleive that her precious little daughter has turned into a flesh eating monster. One of those numbnuts are going to get themselves bit by one of their precious free range cats, and refuse to believe Tinkerbell’s brain just happens to be turning into a toxic gray slurry sloshing around inside that precious wittle skull.