Tiger at large

Oct. 15, 2009

Dear Pat,

It was a normal Saturday morning. DC busied herself in the backyard before we left for the Homecoming parade. A small, tiger-striped young cat appeared and kept getting under her feet, meowing at her. She picked the cat up a couple of times, but it didn't like to be held for long. Then it rolled over on its back and DC began stroking its belly. Suddenly blood spouted from a vein beneath her wrist. Bitten, DC yelped. The cat vanished.

DC, who loves all furred, feathered and scaled beings, was reminded that many of those beings don't always respond to human forms of affection with affection. If the cat isn't located and quarantined within the next few days, DC must be vaccinated for rabies. The odds the cat has rabies are small, but rabies is almost always fatal. You don't bet against those odds.

At the emergency room DC was surrounded by people who fear they may have the flu. Some wore masks. Rabies isn't transmitted from human to human, but an emergency room probably makes a fine incubator for a flu pandemic.

Now that she's in this situation DC has heard from many people who've visited this limbo themselves or even had the shots. An immune globulin shot is injected at the site of the bite. Then a series of rabies vaccinations are given over the next 28 days. These are no longer the painful shots people once had to undergo, but nobody wants to get pricked by a needle unless it's necessary.

Fortunately, vaccination and animal control programs have reduced rabies deaths in the U.S. to one or two annually. Only about 10 percent of rabies infections are spread by domestic animals. Unfortunately, cats are two or three times more likely to have rabies than dogs or cattle. Their tendencies to roam and to go unvaccinated make them especially vulnerable.

Rabies makes you appreciate that nature can be at once unaffectionate and brilliant. If you were a virus with the natural urge to propagate, one means would be to seed your future in your host's saliva and make the host crazily aggressive toward other animals.

At the dental hygiene school where DC teaches, the other faculty members quip that they expect to see her walking down the hall foaming at the mouth any day. It's a dental joke. Black humor sometimes succeeds where sympathy might fail.

The cat had been seen around the neighborhood a few times before. DC thinks it might have been a female in heat who dropped by Saturday to woo our friends' cat Sunday. Sunday is the cat's name.

A few nights ago DC thought she saw the tiger-striped cat crossing the street near our house. It scurried off when a car approached. In the dark, and in daylight we have walked the streets and alleys of our neighborhood looking for movement or gleaming eyes.

There are many cats, just not this cat.

If that was the cat we're looking for running around at night, the chances increase that it's wild. But rabid animals bite unprovoked. Under the Centers for Disease Control guidelines, a bite that occurs while petting an animal unknown to you is considered provoked. That might be the lesson here for anyone.

It's still a sweet little cat, DC says.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.