I’d just like to say how much I admire you, not only for trying to help the poor injured cat, but also for the phrase:
Very few things make me angrier than irresponsible pet-owners. I can’t understand how anyone could allow an animal they presumably claim to care about to suffer like that.
Slightly Off Topic –
Last week I was discussing rabies with my aunt, who is a doctor. It’s the most vivid memory of medical school, to her - some doctors had taped, many years ago, the decline of a patient with full blown rabies. She kinda questionned the ethical nature of this, but did say that NOTHING she has ever seen came quite as close as dying of this diease. It scarred most medical students for life - and they are all treat any human victim of an animal bite ASAP. It’s the one disease in the world which kills quite close to 100% of its victims if left untreated.
shudder She kinda turned green just telling me the story…
<rant> GODDAMNIT, I forgot to log lno out.
That was me.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
</rant off>
Ugh, rabies. A moronic friend of mine works with a group called WildCare in Indiana. She takes care of bats. I totally don’t agree with this – I think nature meant for cute little critters to die without assitance sometimes – but she buys into it completely, and takes these entirely wild, unvaccinated creatures into her home.
I do mean into her home. She has them in a bedroom. She has two cats and a dog (this is Katie from my earlier post) and, while they are not allowed in that particular bedroom, there can be accidents.
She once took care of four bats from a particular group in which one had rabies. They had to take the bats from her and kill them. Then she had to go through the entire regimen of shots, which left her very sick. Plus, she cried for days about the poor bats dying.
She didn’t learn – she took four more bats into her home. And one of them BIT HER. A policy at WildCare is that, if an animal likely to carry rabies bites you, it is destroyed at once to find out if it actually has rabies or not. Well, she didn’t want the poor ittle thing destroyed, so she didn’t tell anyone about it but me.
She didn’t think it had rabies because she had it for a while and didn’t see any symptoms. I think she is probably the stupidest person in the world. She’s got a husband, too.
She exposes her entire household to rabies because she doesn’t want cute little bats killed, when they are pretty much dead anyway!
I hope you agree that this is worse than DUMB, STUPID, IRRESPONSIBLE…goddess, I can’t think of a word bad enough!
Fucking hippies. Can you tell me one thing…
Is their band… a jam band?
Because that would send me over the edge.
Rubystreak - it is possible to get a pre-prophylaxis rabies series done but it’s very expensive - mine would have been about $2,000.00. I have insurance so they paid for it. Plus, you have to have a reason - a doctor’s not just going to give it to someone because they want it. Perhaps one would agree that your friend has a good reason but make sure the insurance company agrees too.
It’s a series of three shots, in the arm, and then you have to get your gamma globulin checked a year later and every so often after that. The shots themselves are not bad at all. I don’t recall my arm even being sore.
I don’t want to hijack this thread, so may I invite you to my karma thread in Great Debates, where we discuss whether or not this attitude is merely good-natured but fuzzy-headed and naive wishful thinking?
RubyStreak, this is not a lame rant.
You’re a good person. Thank you on behalf of animal lovers everywhere.
You can get pre-exposure shots, but they’re pretty fucking expensive. The cheapest I’ve ever seen them offered was $180/shot, for a series of three shots. Sometime this winter my clinic might offer to pay half the cost of our vaccinations, but it’s still gonna me nearly $300. I’m not even sure that health departments routinely carry pre-exposure vaccines for rabies.
Hey, thanks to everyone who replied and told me I did the right thing. Believe me, it wasn’t a matter of me being such a saintly person; anyone who saw that kitty bleeding and dragging his tail like that would have done the same thing. There was no way NOT to do it.
I plan to take the other two unvaccinated cats to a $10 clinic that will give them all their shots… but it’s not until January. They probably won’t go outside much now that it’s so cold here anyway. But I had to call for the appointment; they were completely uninterested in doing it for themselves.
My friend who lives in the house with these madmen is, of course, uninsured, so getting rabies shots is not gonna happen. They are all just going to have to cross their fingers and hope for the best. I do not envy them.
My wife works at one of those wildlife rescue places. People bring in animals with obvious neurological problems (“It was stumbling around the driveway so I picked it up and my daughter held it while I drove here.” She rolls her eyes at these people. OTOH, I grew up in rabies country so my reaction to any animal I see that is acting oddly–and with some the fact that I can see them instead of them hiding is odd behavior–is to want to shoot it.
Jesus, some of these kids are covered with flea bites after hugging Snuggles the Squirrel. The moms say, “Oh, what can she catch from a squirrel?” Wife says, “How about Bubonic Plague?” The families want to know that Snuggles is going to be alright but I’ve seen the check-in book.
“I know what DOA means but does EOA mean what I think it does?”
“Euthanized On Delivery.”
“That’s what I thought. Between the two that’s better than half of what’s here. Then there’s all of these ‘Released’ ones.”
“Birds fly into windows and are stunned for a few minutes. We let 'em go out back.”