Feb 25
More on the Maymont Bears
A quick blog jog on entries referencing the Maymont Bears that were euthanized after one of them bit a four-year-old boy who had breached a safety gate reveals that most people seem to be siding with the bears over the child.
Should the bears have been euthanized so that rabies tests should have been performed? The problem with isolating the bears in quarrantine, which is likely what would have happened if a stray dog had bitten the child, is that dogs would show symptoms in a shorter time. (I believe the typical quarrantine is twelve days.) No one is sure exactly how long a rabid bear would take to show obvious symptoms, but 45 days or more has been suggested; in that amount of time, the child, if he had been exposed, would likely have been deathly ill unless he received the rabies treatment.
The treatment, incidentally, isn’t as bad as it used to be. My mom tells me that when she was little, her mother made her and her siblings take the shots when a possibly-rabid animal had entered their yard. Back then, it was a series of shots administered into the abdomen. It was a painful procedure, to say the least.
Today, the treatment involves five shots administered in the arm, on the day of exposure, the third day, the seventh day, the fourteenth day, and the 28th day. The shot allows the body to quickly prepare antibodies that fight the rabies virus.
The sidebar poll has been changed to ask what you would do in this situation. Would you make the child take the shots or would you have performed the test on the bears?
February 25th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
First off, my kids would not have made it over the first fence. I would have snatched them off that fence so fast their head would swim. Second, and more importantly, if things had for some amazing reason gone as far as it did with the family in question, my kids would have gone through the shots, and no animals would have died.
This was not the bears’ fault! If anyone should be in trouble it should be the parents (as I noted in my previous comments). Have you heard whether or not the preserve is going to sue the family or prosecute them in any way?
February 26th, 2006 at 11:58 am
Firstly, I would never have allowed my child to go past the sign. However, if I had a momentary lapse of reason I would have my child take the shots and would explain to the child that I had failed them and was to blame.
March 2nd, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Aside from the incredible stupidity in evidence on both sides of this question, I’d lay a little blame on the urban mythology that rabies shots still require abdomnal innoculations daily for 28 days.
Then I’d shoot the parent(s).