Last month a number of Ariss residents noticed an animal acting strangely in the area.
Marion Moore said she first noticed the raccoon on Dec. 23 when it poked its head out of a culvert at the front of her property.
“I did follow him just to see what was up with him,” she said. “Then he was staggering and just kind of … waving his paws in front of his face.”
Moore followed him for about 45 minutes and watched the raccoon walk directly into a spotlight in the ground and she got within six inches of the animal without it acknowledging she was there.
“And then I could tell he was blind, his eyes were all sealed shut,” she said.
She put in a call to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) and another neighbour called the Guelph-Eramosa animal control officer. Eventually animal control came and disposed of the animal. Moore’s concern was that the raccoon had rabies.
On Dec. 4, 2015 Ontario had its first reported case of rabies since 2005, explained Chris Davies, manager of the wildlife research and monitoring section of the MNRF. To date there have been 15 reported cases of raccoon rabies in the Hamilton area and one case of fox rabies in a cow in Stratford since the beginning of December.
“What MNRF has done is we went in within 48 hours and we started putting out baits, we have these vaccine bait that we distribute and the idea is the animal eats them, breaks the bait and when the bait breaks the vaccine that’s inside it hits the back of the mouth and throat and the animal gets vaccinated against rabies,” Davies explained.
The baiting occurred within a 25km radius of the recorded rabies cases until Dec. 27, when the temperatures turned cold and it became less likely animals would leave their dens and find the bait.
While no area of Wellington County is within the baiting zones, Davies did point out that the southern and northwestern portions of the county are in the surveillance zones for both raccoon rabies and fox rabies.
“A total of 50 kilometres within any of the cases is called the surveillance zone where we are continuing to collect samples of strange-acting animals to document any additional cases,” Davies explained.
Anyone who sees an animal acting strange is asked to call public health or animal control for the municipality. However, when in doubt public health will likely be able to direct the individual to the correct contact.
Davies explained that if there has been human contact with the suspicious animal it is the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care’s responsibility to collect and test the animal. The person who had contact should also talk to their doctor. If livestock or pets have been in contact with the suspicious animal it’s the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs’ responsibility. And if it is just an animal acting strangely in the wild it’s the responsibility of the MNRF.
However, Davies cautioned that very few animals that are acting strange actually have rabies; it is more likely that they have canine distemper.
“Symptomatically it’s identical to rabies,” Davies said. “In other words, an animal with distemper acts the same way as an animal with rabies.”
And the disease is passing through southwestern Ontario this year.
When the MNRF obtains a sample from an animal that is acting strange it is tested for the likelihood of rabies. If there is a high probability the test is positive the sample is sent away for confirmation. If the probability is low, the sample is sent to a facility in Guelph to test for other diseases. This year about 95% of samples collected from sick animals test positive for canine distemper.
“So it’s way more common than the rabies is in [Wellington County],” Davies said.
“So when someone sees a sick looking raccoon do not assume it’s rabid. It might be, it might not be, and we can’t tell until we run appropriate lab tests.”
Though distemper is not transferable to humans the way rabies is, it is transferable to pets and can be fatal.
Davies said it’s possible to vaccinate a pet against canine distemper when it is vaccinated against rabies; however, because distemper is not a reportable disease the vaccination is not mandatory like the rabies vaccine.
