Cat Goes Mad

While hiking in England a headline in a small town paper caught my eye: "COW BRUTALLY ATTACKS OAP". Yes, it was all caps. In fact, those four words were the only thing on the front page. (By the way, "OAP" means "old age pensioner". I had to look it up.) In any case it brought to mind a story my wife told me about a similarly startling headline in the Winnipeg Sun when she was growing up. Apparently the front page screamed, "CAT GOES MAD", accompanied by a picture of a suitably concerned looking elderly woman sitting on a couch festooned with doilies. And this got me thinking about rabies in cats. That's how that funky old train of thought sometimes goes. One minute you're thinking about oaps and the next you're thinking about feline rabies.

Rabid cats came so readily to mind because just prior to leaving for England I had a telephone conversation with a client about the subject. As I outlined in the last post I don't always have a minute-by-minute overview of my telephone messages. In fact an hour or more can easily go by before I see them. On this particular morning I opened the message center on my computer to find a series of increasingly frantic sounding messages from Mr. Stirling:
-Please call. Thinks Buttons has rabies.
-Urgent: Very concerned about his rabid cat.
-Called again!!
Intrigued, I called Mr. Stirling back.
"Hello, I understand you are worried that Buttons might have rabies?"
"Yes! She's not acting like herself at all!"
"How so? Can you describe what she is doing please?"
"Usually I keep the bedroom door closed at night, but two nights ago I left it open and she came into my room in the middle of the night."
"Yes..."
"And then she jumped on me and sat there for a while. I woke up but I didn't move. Then she bit me!"
"Oh dear. Did she break the skin?"
"No. I guess it was more of a nibble than a bite."
"Hmm. Anything else?"
"Yes! Then last night she did the same thing, except without the bite. That time she just purred loudly."
This was beginning to shape up like a Monty Python sketch.

I have a great deal of faith in the shrewdness of my readership, so I'm confident you can more or less reconstruct my response and the rest of the conversation. No, Buttons did not have rabies. Buttons was bored and lonely and wanted to play. Mr. Stirling was relieved. He called back the next day to apologize for overreacting. There was no need to apologize. I would much rather people took rabies "too seriously" than not seriously enough, because that side of the coin is all too prevalent.

I am sometimes asked how many cases of rabies I have seen in my patients. The answer is zero. Shallow thinkers will take that as evidence that vaccination is not necessary. This is of course the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is that it is evidence for the effectiveness of the vaccination program. Otherwise it's a bit like saying, "See my house has never burnt down so I can start letting the kids play with blowtorches." Countries without comprehensive rabies vaccination programs have shockingly high rates of the disease. 20,000 people die of rabies every year in India. Twenty thousand people die.
(http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150915-indias-rabid-dog-problem-is-running-the-country-ragged)
It is one of the ugliest deaths imaginable. And the number of animals dying of it must be an order of magnitude higher.

So please, if you are at all concerned that your cat or dog (or cow) has gone mad, please do not hesitate to call. We won't laugh. (Unless you use a Michael Palin voice.)