What would you do? (Part Two)
While the Internet can be very informative, there is also a lot of rubbish touted through various websites so always double-check your facts
YEARS AGO, someone told me what one expatriate woman did with her family’s pets before she and her family moved back to their home country.
She made her decision after one of her two dogs got into a fight with a soi dog no one had ever seen before. Her dog wasn’t aggressive, but when this strange dog appeared and attacked him, he defended himself.
The fight was over quickly. The family dog protected his territory well, and the strange dog ran down the soi and disappeared. No one ever saw him again.
The winner, though, had some bite wounds on his face and body. At the vet’s, he was treated with antibiotics, his wounds were cleaned every day, and after a week or so, the injuries had healed nicely.
The vet herself wasn’t worried. The woman had had her animals – the two dogs as well as a cat – neutered and then vaccinated every year.
In the five or so years they had lived with the family, all three were healthy, well-adjusted, well-loved animals.
That fight, though, stayed in the owner’s mind. The family couldn’t take the three animals with them to their home country, but the woman had, by great good luck, found another family who would provide a home for all three.
The owner, however, began to worry. Had the strange dog been exposed to rabies (hydrophobia)? Had her dog been exposed as a result of the bites? Had he then transferred the rabies virus to the two other family pets?
Just how effective were the vaccinations against rabies that the dogs and cat had been receiving?
Was her family in danger?
Her questions were valid, and her vet, if asked, would have reassured her and advised to keep the pets under observation for around two weeks.
She didn’t ask her vet. Instead, she began searching the Internet.
My vet has specifically ordered me to stay away from the Internet for a very good reason. There’s a lot of good information out there, but there’s also a lot of rubbish.
If I’m checking information on my pets, I go to sites I trust, such as pets.webmd.com, www.PetEducation.com, www.PetMD.com, any Spca site such as www.Aspca.org, or any WHO site.
In general, it takes around 10 days to two weeks for symptoms to appear after a bite from an infected animal. Once symptoms appear, there is no treatment. Rabies cannot be cured and results in a painful death.
Thai health authorities are growing increasingly worried about the rising occurrence of bites from rabid animals in Thailand. They recommend vaccination against rabies after any animal bite, whether or not you know the animal that bit you isn’t rabid.
That woman, however, didn’t really do a careful check of all the websites available. Instead, she found one website that mentioned that the rabies virus can lie inactive in a body for even five years before the symptoms appear.
I don’t know how accurate this information is, or if it was indeed referring to the rabies virus in dogs. I don’t even know what that website was, but on the basis of what she had read from that one website _ and despite recommendations from the vet, who said that it was highly unlikely that her animals were infected with rabies – she had the vet put the three unfortunate animals down.
“How terrible it would be if anyone who adopted these animals was infected with such a deadly disease,” she explained. “I don’t want to be responsible for putting anyone in danger.”
Nothing is sure in this world, not even vaccinations, but it seems to me that keeping the pets under observation for a certain amount of time would have been more productive than killing them.
