"There’s a strain of rabies where the animals get very, very friendly..."

"... [a] family saw a raccoon that kind of showed up on their front step and he was sick and he was so cute and wanted to be petted. And you know when raccoons aren’t barring their teeth they are pretty cute."

Said a health official quoted in "Outbreaks of rabies seem to be rising across the U.S., CDC surveillance shows/The CDC's rabies team says it's tracking 15 different likely outbreaks from New York to Oregon" (NBC News)(citing 6 deaths from rabies in the U.S. in the past 12 months).

"The family petted and fed the animal until it died. They called animal services to pick up the body 'and thank God they did, because when they sent the brain out to be tested, it was positive, and so the whole family had to get vaccinated.... Oh, my gosh, they never would have known if they hadn’t called animal services.'"

Do not approach the fox! I see "The tale of a wild fox on Capitol Hill had captivated those who live and work there."

In the NYT: "The Capitol Fox, Euthanized After Attacks, Tests Positive for Rabies/The tale of a wild fox on Capitol Hill had captivated those who live and work there. Then a congressman and several others were bitten, the fox was captured and she turned out to be rabid."

Oh, humans of Washington — you who think you know what's good for us people who live outside your charmed circle —  what do you know of how the world works? Did you think you were lucky that a cute fox was happy to walk up to you? Did you experience it as a testament to your charisma?

Here's an article from April 5th, before the fox tested positive: "'Have You Seen the Capitol Fox?'Animal control officers descended on Capitol Hill after reports of lawmakers, staff members and reporters being attacked by a wild fox believed to have been nesting on the Capitol grounds" (NYT).

"Street dogs and people in India often have a kind of understanding. The dogs aren’t wild, but they aren’t owned either."

"Free-roaming dogs are often supported by the community, but nobody decides when and where they live, eat or mate.... Rahul Sehgal, the India-Asia director for the Humane Society International, who is based in Ahmedabad, said, 'In other places people don’t feed dogs.' But, he said, 'I haven’t seen a single place in India where dogs are not fed by individuals or community.'... There are about 35 million dogs in India... the dogs are mostly outside.... In North America and Western Europe, increasing wealth has led to a change in the status of dogs, which has certainly made rabies control by vaccination much easier. As Dr. Wallace put it, they move off the streets, 'into our yards, then our houses, then our beds.' In India, a big reduction in street dog populations would mark a significant cultural change.... As India becomes more urban and standards of living increase, he said, 'Suddenly people are intolerant of dogs.' People travel to other countries, he said, and 'they don’t see dogs in the street.' Over time, street dogs may disappear in the cities.... If so, that would be a very different India. Despite noise, feces, bites and the always present chance of rabies, the attitude of many Indians toward free-roaming dogs is still extraordinary tolerance."

From "Rabies Kills Tens of Thousands Yearly. Vaccinating Dogs Could Stop It/Sometimes the interests of humans and animals are the same, but humans have to save the animals first" (NYT), which tells about Mission Rabies, an effort to catch and vaccinate street dogs in India, where something like 20,000 people die of rabies every year. The vaccinated dogs are set free, and the vaccination lasts only one year. The vaccinated dog is marked with paint, but the paint lasts only "for a week or so."

ADDED: Something that I don't think is examined in the article: What benefits are provided by wild dogs roaming all over the place? I don't mean the sort of companionship that corresponds to the role of an indoor pet dog. Perhaps the rabies problem is tolerated because the dogs are controlling rats and consuming garbage. They're doing work that provides a greater health benefit — a greater good for a greater number. 20,000 sounds like a lot of loss, a lot of suffering, but it might be outweighed by other health benefits, quite aside from the love and companionship we automatically think of when we think of dogs.

"The bats never hurt us, and we were always catching them in our hands and releasing them outside because you hear all the time about how bats are good..."

"... for the insect population, and you don’t want to hurt them... The bats would lick our fingers, almost like they could taste the saltiness of our fingers, but they never bit us.... I've always thought bats were kind of cute, but I had no idea the kind of risk we were at. We would wake up in the night and they would be walking on our bed."

Said Juanita Giles, who, with her husband Gary, was on friendly terms with the bats in their house, quoted in "Utah man, 55, who used to encourage bats to land on his hands to feed becomes the state's first rabies death since 1944" (Daily Mail).

"Grandma strangles rabid bobcat with her bare hands."

ANY Post headline. The "Grandma" is a 46-year-old woman, DeDe Phillips. She was taking a photo of the animal when it "took two steps and was on top of me . . . it came for my face."

“I took it straight to the ground and started inching my hands up to its throat... Once I got him where he wasn’t moving I started screaming for my daughter-in-law to call 911,” she said....

“They go for your jugular . . . when they can get the vein you’re dead in a couple of minutes,” she said, noting she was careful not to yell until the cat was subdued, because she didn’t want her 5-year-old granddaughter to come outside.

Phillips refused to release the beast until her son showed up and stabbed the animal “four or five times.”

“It never budged, so I knew it was completely dead,” she said.

"Top 5 Wisconsin wildlife risks to humans? Maybe not what you think."

Okay. I'll  play. I only read the headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and have not glanced at the answers, though I did see the photo of bees. So I will include bees. The other 4? I'll say: spiders, bats, deer (car crashes), and ticks.

Okay, now I'm looking. Deer was correct. I left out mosquitoes (even though I was thinking about mosquitoes! I feel like cheating and adding mosquitoes to my list). Ticks was correct. Bees was correct. Bats and spiders were wrong. The final category is bears, wolves and cougars, and I must say I considered bears and wolves but decided against it, in part because of the "Maybe not what you think," but also because I can't remember ever reading about a bear or wolf attack in Wisconsin. You think of the big predators when you're out in the wilder places, but when do they ever get anywhere near you? It's those pesky ticks, waiting on the tip of every leaf, that will get you.

The threats to humans from Wisconsin's largest wild predators are, statistically speaking, extremely low.

Yeah, so why are they on the list?

The last recorded injury to a human from a bear was in June 2017 when a man sustained a bite to the thigh in Florence County.

"Most of these bear/human interactions are a result of dog/bear interaction and the human rushes in to save their dog," said USDA's Hirchert. "An actual predatory action towards a human from a bear is extremely rare in Wisconsin."

There has been no wolf or cougar attack on a human in Wisconsin in modern history, according to USDA records.

That said, the big animals rightfully elicit an abundance of caution.

That said! I'll that-said you. You said, "Maybe not what you think." That said, you shouldn't have put bears, wolves, and cougars on the list. Did you check bats and spiders? Hmm?! I'm checking.

Well... 2 brown recluse spiders have been found in Wisconsin in the last quarter century.

As for bats: "The last four cases of human rabies in Wisconsin occurred in 1959, 2000, 2004 and 2010. All four Wisconsin cases acquired the disease from infected bats." The thing about bats is that they can get in your house and you have to deal with it as if the bat carried the horrific disease. You're never lying in bed and suddenly think There's a bear in the house! and spring into action. I mean, I know it has happened....

"I knew instantly it had to be rabid... Imagine the Tasmanian devil... I knew it was going to bite me."

"I didn’t think I could strangle [the raccoon] with my bare hands... With my thumb in its mouth, I just pushed its head down into the muck... It was still struggling and clawing at my arms. It wouldn’t let go of my thumb.... It felt like ‘Pet Sematary’... If there hadn’t been water on the ground, I don’t know what I would have done.... I’ve never killed an animal with my bare hands. I’m a vegetarian. It was self-defense... I always thought of raccoons as this cute, cuddly forest animal...."

Said Rachel Borch, who was jogging through the woods near her home in Hope, Maine.

"A Wisconsin woman who was the first person known to survive rabies without a vaccine has given birth to twins."

Nice to hear about good things happening to Jeanna Giese-Frassetto, who was bitten by a bat in 2004— in a church in Fond du Lac.

Here's some of the description of her case that can be found in the book "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus":

"Email has evolved into a weird medium of communication where the best thing you can do is destroy it quickly, as if every email were a rabid bat attacking your face."

"Yet even the tragically email-burdened still have a weird love for this particular rabid, face-attacking bat."

Quoted in "The Triumph of Email/Why does one of the world’s most reviled technologies keep winning?" by Adrienne LaFrance, who says "That love may not be all that weird, though—especially as email’s competitors, with push notifications, become more annoying. Email works. It’s open. It’s lovely on mobile...."

"No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all."

On NPR last evening, the topic was the Aurora movie-theater murders, and the NPR host, Robert Siegel, invited WaPo's E.J. Dionne to comment on "mass shootings, guns and politics." Siegel quoted something Dionne had written, that events like this cause "our whole public reasoning process [to go] haywire." That is, other people go crazy and can't think straight, so let's check out the quality of Dionne's thinking.

What I mean by that is that the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby have such a firm hold on our political system that no one can bring up the notion, which we bring up with every other kind of tragedy, that maybe we can do better. Maybe there are laws we could pass that would prevent something like this.

No one pretends that better laws would prevent all tragedies, but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all. We have the most permissive gun laws pretty much in the industrialized world. And I hope, but I have no confidence, that we won't make the same mistake again.

I'd like to think that one time, we could say: Oh, let's open this up. Let's talk about the assault weapons ban. Let's talk about ways in which we might reduce the chances that someone with mental problems might get a gun. And I'm just worried that we're going to revert right back to our usual sort of giving and saying, well, the gun lobby controls Washington, so we can never do anything about things like this.

Maybe we can do better.... laws can't solve everything... but if that were the standard, then we wouldn't pass any laws at all... so... so, what? Since we do sometimes pass laws, we must think that laws can sometimes help when there's a problem. And there's a problem, so... so... what?  Let's open this up. Let's talk about it.  E.J. Dionne is afraid we'll just knee-jerk do nothing, instead of knee-jerk propose gun control... I mean think and think with thoughtful contemplation and talk about and around and through and through and arrive at the solution that immediately popped into E.J. Dionne's mind.

I'm fascinated by this notion that we do sometimes pass laws and therefore that means that we should pass laws. The resistance to passing laws is some nasty dysfunction caused by a nefarious interest group — here, the NRA — but good people want to do something. This do something orientation is characteristic of the modern liberal mind. I heard Dionne saying that on the radio yesterday evening, but it came back to me as I was reading about rabies and marveling at the crazy — desperate — ideas for a cure: "you burn a hair from the dog that bit you and insert the ashes into the wound... [a] maggot from a dead dog's body... a linen cloth soaked with menstrual blood of a female dog... [c]hicken excrement, 'if it is of a red color'... [a]shes from the tail of a shrew-mouse...."

When is it that reasoning goes haywire? After Dionne presented his patchwork of liberal logic, the host called upon David Brooks. (Don't say NPR doesn't balance liberals and conservatives!) He said...

Well, I'm no fan of the NRA, I'm not really an opponent of gun control or an assault weapon ban...

That sounds like a necessary preface for the NPR listeners, but I'm going to give Brooks credit for subtly deactivating the bogeyman Dionne inserted into his call to action, because Brooks continues with:

... but, you know, public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work. 

Brooks is displaying the pin with which he is about to puncture the liberal's inflated self-image.

This is one of the most studied things in criminology. And the weight of the evidence is pretty clear that there's no relationship between gun control and violent crime. Areas with higher gun control do not have less violent crime. Over the last few years, the number of new guns entering the country has been about four million a year. 

So you've got to look at evidence, not your instinctive notions about what just might work. Put down that shrew mouse's tail now, E.J.

At the same time, violent crime has plummeted by about 41 percent a year.

Brooks's "evidence and data" dump seemed really powerful until he got to that implausible percentage. What is it, 41% a decade, I don't know what to make of this point-counterpoint style radio presentation. There are no links to click on, so I'm just forced to be suspicious of Brooks's I've-got-the-facts posturing. [ADDED: Meade suggests that the percentage of decline has increased by 41% a year.]

Brooks concludes:

So I'm not necessarily opposed to the policy, I don't really think it would matter in violent crime generally, and I really don't think it would matter too much in the case of lunatics or whatever who are committed to this sort of pre-planned massacre.

So Brooks retreats to reassuring the NPR audience: He's not opposed to gun control, he just doesn't think it would work.  He began with the assertion that "public policy is based on evidence and data and whether it would work," explained why he didn't think it would work, but nevertheless won't oppose the policy. Brooks isn't a conservative by my standard. I think to be conservative, you should have the instinctive orientation: do nothing. You have to convince us what you've got there is better than nothing. And what have you got there? A bucket of red chickenshit? A dog's tampon?!!

Now, how will the very very thoughtful E.J. Dionne deal with Brooks's argument from evidence! and data! He's got to demonstrate that he's one of the smart people, the non-haywire people, your betters who proposed open and thorough debate about solutions to problems (after the bogeymen are kicked out of the room):

DIONNE: If we had better background checks, yes we'll miss some lunatics, but with real background checks, we could reduce the number of lunatics who get guns. And there's also a spillover. If you have permissive laws in one state - as Mayor Bloomberg has shown, Mayor Bloomberg of New York, who has proposed a lot of very practical remedies, not sweeping remedies but practical remedies - he's shown how loose laws in one state can send guns into a state that may have stricter laws. So I don't think we should throw up our hands and say it's impossible...

BROOKS: Yeah, one area of agreement, I do think people who have history of mental health issues, and this came up with the Loughner case, that...

SIEGEL: The shooting of Gabby Giffords...

BROOKS: That should show up when you're trying to buy a gun. And legally, that's supposed to happen, but it doesn't always happen.

SIEGEL: We don't know all that much about the suspect. So far no indication that any such record would have shown up. We just don't know yet.

DIONNE: Right, and my argument is not that you can prevent every one of these things, but when I heard this this morning, like everybody else, I was, you know, sick about it. And I just thought that every time this happens, people say, well, there are very particular factors in this case, so let's not talk about gun control, gun control wouldn't solve it. Well, maybe it would, or maybe it wouldn't in a particular case, but it would prevent some of these things in the future.

And there you have it, the liberal mind at work, in real time.

"The first symptom is... this tingling sensation at the site of the wound."

"Like, you didn't have it before, all that time that rabies was crawling up to the brain. Usually the wound has even healed at this point. But once your brain is infected, you'll often start to feel something odd at the site: a tingling, an itch, a stabbing pain. It sounds almost supernatural, but apparently it's true."

Rabies. Much more at the link, including the origin of the phrase "the hair of the dog."

Pliny the Elder... suggested that you burn a hair from the dog that bit you and insert the ashes into the wound... But he also rattled off this mindblowing series of other possible remedies. A maggot from a dead dog's body, or a linen cloth soaked with menstrual blood of a female dog. Chicken excrement, "if it is of a red color." Ashes from the tail of a shrew-mouse!

Something strong is needed. What do we have around here that's strong? (Reminds me of the way some people today think about politics!)

Here's the book: "Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus." I just bought it myself.

"Skunk that bit person at Maryland restaurant was rabid."

Oh, good lord.

And I was just reading some Zagat article called "Worst Meal Ever: 21 Tales of Disastrous Dinners." Most were about things like a tuft of hair in the food or insects in the vinegar. Just a skunk in the restaurant is worst than all that. But the skunk in the restaurant bites you. And then on top of all that it's rabid!

Maybe we should eat in.

"More than six years ago, John and Ann Giese stood at their daughter's hospital bed as saliva flooded her mouth and the rabies virus progressed toward its end."

"In every case to that point, if you got the virus without prompt vaccination, you died - usually within seven days of the first symptoms."

The daughter, Jeanna, survived and has now graduated from college.

"So many were so invested in the notion that by thinking peaceful thoughts they could will into existence a state of peaceful affairs..."

"... that they ignored the evidence right in front of them, which tended to suggest that cougars were quite happy to eat anything that was juicy, delicious, and unlikely to fight back."

From an old book review I googled up after yesterday's encounter with a mountain lion on Hermosa Creek Trail. In the comments on my post about the incident, Michael McNeil said:

While actually encountering a mountain lion on a trail might certainly be expected to inspire concern, it is not sensible to be overly worried that “he was going to pounce on me.”

Folks might like to peruse this page from the California Department of Fish and Game listing all verified mountain lion attacks in the state over the last almost 120 years — this in a state of (now) more than 35 million people, millions of whom live in relatively remote suburbs where tens of thousands of mountain lions roam in close proximity.

Notice the number: a grand total of 16, only six of which were fatal, while two of those were due to rabies.

Clearly, it takes a mountain lion that is extremely seriously deranged by their standards — such as sick with rabies (which obviously not very many are) — not just hungry or even starving — for it to attack a human. Thus, there's no reason for inordinate concern even if one does see a lion.

Glenn Reynolds posts every now and then about mountain lions, and while they're obviously capable of harming people, he talks as if in fact they're an extremely dangerous threat that should be exterminated from all human-occupied areas (i.e., nearly everywhere these days). Given the foregoing statistics, that's plain nuts.

Note that I live in a neighborhood in California where a lion was seen just a month or two ago, so I'm not just blithely talking from some locale remote from the “danger.” Personally I find those statistics quite reassuring, as should we all.

I searched the Instapundit archive for "mountain lion" and think Glenn is talking not about extermination but self-defense, the reduction of numbers through hunting, and preserving the animals' fear of people (which is presumably the reason why, in the past, there have been so few attacks). Glenn is also interested in something I'm fascinated by: human sentimentality about animals. And then there is the more general human problem of the way sentimentality interferes with the perception of danger:

One need only look at the treatment of such other topics as crime, terrorism, and warfare to see examples of the same sort of misplaced sentimentality and willful ignorance. Tolerance of criminality leads to more crime; tolerance of terrorism leads to more terrorism; efforts to appear defenseless lead to war....

The effort to remake the world so that it is safe for predators seems rather odd to me. What sort of person would rather be prey? The sort who lives in upscale neighborhoods, and campaigns against hunting, apparently. I suspect that over the long term this isn't a viable evolutionary strategy in a world where predators abound.

The challenge is to get into the zone of clear thinking. We need to be alert but not paranoid. Our ancestors survived — and we therefore exist — because they noticed things and acted. Maybe they overdid it and stamped out various animals and human beings who triggered their innate edginess. The mellowest humans lost out in the evolutionary struggle, and we have inherited a tendency to overreact to things that feel dangerous, like a big cat slipping across the trail 150 feet away. But we have the capacity to gather accurate information and to think about exactly how dangerous a cat at that distance is. We also have the ability to think about whether our love for beautiful animals means we can welcome them in our yard or our house. We have instincts and we have big brains, and we need to use them.

Sports headlines toy with the brains of nonfans.

I've long been annoyed by the NYT blog called "Bats." I was bitten by a bat once and had to get rabies shots. And I've had other run-ins with the leathery-winged fiends. Actually, I love them when they are outside, eating mosquitoes and so forth. I might like reading a blog about bats. But Bats is not about bats. It's about baseball. (Maybe if I cared about baseball, I'd still hate the blog title "Bats," either because it disrespects pitchers or because I would still think it was about bats.)

Now, today, The Washington Post has a front-page teaser: "Do Juicers Belong in the Hall of Fame?" And I'm thinking, so there's an Appliances Hall of Fame? Where is it? What was the first inductee? Refrigerator! I'll bet it's refrigerator! But I click to the article —which is (obscurely) re-titled "Do Juicers Belong in Canton?" — and see that it's about drug users and the Baseball Football Hall of Fame. Oh, I don't know. But if there's an Appliances Hall of Fame, it's scraping to low too let in the juicers.

"Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm."

Jogger runs mile with rabid fox locked on her arm!

***

After the fox bit her on the foot, she decided to catch it and bring it in for testing. This led to additional biting. That was a bad move. She had some hope of avoiding rabies shots, if she successfully brought the animal in for testing and it was not rabid, but do you know that if you are bitten badly enough, the rabies shots might not save your life? I learned this from expert doctors who interviewed me at the UW Hospital after I was bitten by a bat. I wanted to know if the shots ever failed, and they cited some cases in which a person received large, tearing bites from a wolf. Don't tangle with a wild animal. Just get the shots. They are not that bad.

5-year-old boy, bitten by a rabid fox, holds the animal down for more than a minute to protect 6 other children...

Rayshun McDowell. Very impressive.

Rayshun's stepfather, Ryan Thompson, pulled the boy off the animal and kicked it. A neighbor fired a handgun three times but the fox continued to advance.

Thompson, wearing a cast because of a broken leg, said he used a stick and his crutch to beat the fox to death.

This story should be on Fox News, but I got it from CNN.

IN THE COMMENTS: Politics! This seems to be a political story for some reason.

... We have met the rabid animal, and he is us.

MORE: Video of the boy.

"What makes Michael B. Nifong different" from all the many prosecutors who don't pay a harsh price for their abuses?

Asks Adam Liptak:

“The very same facts that made this case attractive to a prosecutor up for election and a huge publicity magnet — race, sex, class, lacrosse stars, a prominent university — also led to his undoing when the case collapsed and his conduct was scrutinized in and beyond North Carolina,” said Stephen M. Gillers, a law professor at New York University and the author of “Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics.”...

Prosecutors say they seldom face discipline because conduct like Mr. Nifong’s in this sexual-assault case is exceptional.

“Nifong’s case is rarer than human rabies, which is one reason it is such huge news,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “The defense bar is piling on and trying to claim this is typical behavior.”...

“A prosecutor’s violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned by the courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies,” Bennett L. Gershman wrote in his treatise, “Prosecutorial Misconduct.”

Mr. Gershman, a former prosecutor in Manhattan who teaches law at Pace University, said the Nifong case was handled differently because of the publicity. “The fact that it resulted in national exposure,” he said, “had to have put the disciplinary body and the entire system of justice under the spotlight.”

“You have rogue prosecutors all over the country who have engaged in far, far more egregious misconduct, and in a pattern of cases,” he added. “And nothing happens.”

So did Nifong's case get out attention because his behavior was that much worse that the usual cases of prosecutorial misconduct or because of the "publicity magnet" factors? The best way to find out the answer to that question is to continue to pay attention to the abuses of prosecutors. If we can't maintain our attention long enough to see the extent of the problem, then we will know we cared because of the sports and the sex and the race and the elite university.

Audible Althouse #85.

A new podcast... about an old tree, a fat and pompous politician, a girl who survived rabies, a record album from 40 years ago, a possibly evil artist, and succulent flowers and puffy clouds.

You don't need an iPod. You can stream it right through your computer here.

But all the rational people subscribe on iTunes:

"There will always be a tomorrow, whether on this Earth or not."

Says Jeanna Giese, the Wisconsin girl who survived rabies. She just went to the prom and graduated from high school.

On Sept. 12, 2004, the then-15-year-old was bitten by a bat after picking it up by its wings inside St. Patrick Catholic Church in Fond du Lac....

More than a month later, Giese was admitted to Children's Hospital with a fever of 102 degrees, double vision, slurred speech and jerking in her left arm.....

In the fall, she will be a freshman at Marian College, where she plans to major in biology with an emphasis on zoology. Her goal is to work with large cats at a zoo.

Giese says the bat bite has only strengthened her desire to work with animals, which she does daily with her own pets - Pepper the rabbit, pheasants Chicken and Duckie, dogs Maggie and Peanut. If she has her way, she'll soon have a goat and baby duck.

Beautiful. Great perspective. She hasn't turned against the animals (or, I assume, from the church).