This week, John Scalzi’s Weekend Assignment is all about the place you call home:

What is the most interesting thing about where you live? “Thing” in this case would be a famous landmark, a famous current celebrity or historical personage from your home town or county, a notable celebration or sports event — basically, anything that makes where you’re from interesting an unique.Extra Credit: Are there any books that feature your home town (or someplace nearby) in any way?

Well, my regular readers will probably already know that one of the most interesting places I’ve found in Richmond is Maymont, a 100-acre estate left to the city upon the death of its last-surviving owner in the 1920s.

Here’s the grand house:

But there are lots more things to see there on the estate, including an Italian Garden, a Japanese Garden, and a wildlife exhibit with live animals.

As for books about Richmond, Patricia Cornwell’s early Kay Scarpetta novels were set in Richmond.

It’s an interesting place…both Maymont and the city it is a part of.

I drove to Maymont this morning to work on the latest Round Robin Photo Challenge: Summer Gardens.

Maymont is a 100-acre estate with two separate gardens: the Italian Garden, which is pictured here, and a Japanese Garden that is closer to the James River. The Italian Garden is a popular location for local weddings, and as soon as I rounded the corner to approach them, I was immediately met with one of the richest, sweetest smell of roses I’ve experienced in a long time.

I’ll post more pictures from Maymont’s gardens in the next few days, but I wanted to make sure I made the deadline, so enjoy this one!

Making the right decision isn’t always easy. Sometimes, the right thing to do isn’t always the choice that’s wrapped in pretty paper with bright ribbons, or the one decorated with flashing lights that spell out the words, “Pick Me!”

Sometimes, the right thing to do is the thing that just seems so wrong.

How many times have all of us looked at someone else’s decision and said, “I could have told them that wouldn’t work out.” I’m sure we’ve all done it more times than we can count.

The people who made the decision to euthanize the Maymont Bears are under a lot of criticism because of their decision. It was a decision that no one wanted to make, but in the end, the only decision they could make.

I’m an animal lover. But just because I like animals does not mean that I don’t like people or that I think that animals are more important than people. To make such an assumption would be both unfair and unreasonable.

In fact, it’s for the safety of the child, not the animals, that this decision, as painful as it was, turned out to be the correct one.

The Patrick’s Place Poll gave voters two choices: either euthanize the bears and perform the rabies test, or give the child the rabies preventative treatment. Ninety-two percent of voters supported quarrantining the bears and giving the child the rabies treatment.

What really happened seems to have been a third option.

If the child had been receiving the treatment, then euthanizing the bears would definitely seem like an unreasonable extreme. But the child didn’t receive the shots, based on what we know from the multiple accounts. The child’s mom said she told health officials that she was willing to let her child have the shots. But according to the Mayor’s Report on what happened, on the day of the big meeting to decide the bears’ fate, the mother called the health department expert and allegedly told her that she “wished to obtain additional information about the rabies vaccine (to determine whether she would give it to her child)” and said she’d follow-up by noon that day.

Regardless of which account you believe, one fact seems to be consistent in both of them: by Thursday, the fifth day since the bite had happened, the child had received no shots. Time was quickly running out, since the shortest-known human rabies incubation period is only nine days.

No matter how much anger one has for the situation itself, no one can really believe that the child deserved to get rabies. You can’t allow a child to come down with a 100% fatal illness just to teach some kind of lesson. And you can’t take a gamble with a child’s life when there’s no way to know for sure how long the incubation period in the animals might be.

No matter how “low risk” bears have been shown to be when it comes to rabies, the bears shared their habitat with red foxes, which have a higher risk and it was always possible that a raccoon could have gotten inside their habitat and bitten the bear only a day or so earlier: there was no guarantee, no matter what the odds might have been, that the child was going to be safe without either the treatment or the confirmation that the bears weren’t rabid. The fact that the medical experts had to face was that the bears could have been rabid.

It was a tough decision for the health experts, no doubt. But this was the right decision — and really, the only decision — based on the situation they faced.

That doesn’t make it an easy decision, and I’m sure if we’d been witness to that meeting, we’d have quickly discovered that it was not the decision anyone was happy to make.

Doing what’s right isn’t always easy. Sometimes, it’s not even appreciated.

The mother of the child bitten by a bear at Maymont told her story to the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week. The story, which refers to the woman only as “Julia,” answers a few questions, and at the same time, leaves a few new ones unanswered.

The biting incident occurred at around 3:30pm on Saturday, Feb. 18th. The paper carries her account of what happened:

“They were sharing an apple while walking behind the 2-acre bear habitat about 3 p.m., she said, when she turned her head for a few seconds.When she turned back around, her son had cleared the habitat’s preliminary barrier, a 4-foot wooden slat fence, and was standing outside the 10-foot chain-link fence, she said. One of the bears was sitting just on the other side.

“The bear was sitting there quiet and calm,” Julia said. “The bear was not acting aggressive in any way.”

Her son reached his hand through the fence in order to pet the bear, not feed it, she says, and did so before she could reach him.

She saw that his hand was bleeding, took one of the shirts she was wearing and wrapped it up, then carried him to her vehicle and drove him immediately to St. Mary’s hospital, where doctors cleaned out the wound and administered antibiotics.

She says she is sure that they must have mentioned rabies, but doesn’t specifically recall any such mention. Doctors asked how the bite had happened, and when she mentioned the bears, they notified the City Health Department.

Here’s where my first question comes in: why wouldn’t she go to a Maymont official first? It’s a safe bet that Maymont could have administered immediate first aid, since they have to be prepared for accidents involving their own animal keepers. They’d have been aware of the situation from the start, and could have called an ambulance to take the child to the hospital while he was already getting medical attention!

By 8pm that night, when she got home, she had received a message from the Health Department, but no one answered when she called back. She didn’t get an answer on Sunday, either. Monday, February 20th was President’s Day, a holiday.

She talked to health officials on Tuesday, but the first time the rabies process was explained to her was on Wednesday.

Another question: what did health officials talk to her about on Tuesday? We’re talking about a wild animal. She’s sure that that doctors at St. Mary’s must have mentioned rabies on Saturday, yet it wasn’t explained to her until four days after that?

And incidentally, the rabies treatment protocol has the victim receiving the first shot to protect him from rabies on “Day Zero,” the day of the bite. The second of five shots is supposed to be administered on the third day, which would have been Tuesday. So why is she getting her “first explanation” of the procedure on Wednesday?

On Thursday morning, a panel of 14 medical and wildlife experts met to determine how to handle the situation. After hours of deliberations, it was concluded that testing the bears for rabies was the only sure way to guarantee the child’s safety. At lunchtime on Thursday, the woman called the Health Department to tell them that she wanted her child to undergo the rabies treatment, and was told that the bears had already been put down.

If the city was certain enough of a risk of rabies that it went along with euthanizing the bears, why was starting the child on shots even an option on the fifth day, by which he should have already received two shots? The whole premise of putting the bears down to test them for rabies involved keeping the child safe, a motive I completely respect. But part of keeping the child safe, even a bigger part than the postmortem test, would have been giving the child the treatment as a precaution beginning the day the bite happened. Why wouldn’t the doctors not want the child to begin the treatment — to be safe — immediately? Why wouldn’t the doctors have immediately insisted on the need for such a precaution? The mother shouldn’t have been left with any doubt on Saturday about what needed to be done.

And there’s something else that doesn’t add up here. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that it gave local health authorities two options: either put the child on the rabies preventative shots, or test the bears to rule out rabies. Only one was necessary. So if the health department believed the child was going to get the shots or was already receiving them, putting the bears down wouldn’t have been necessary at all.

I called the local health department myself and asked them about possible rabies exposure. They tell me that the average incubation period is between three to eight weeks. There have been cases in which the incubation period has been as short as nine days. The location of the bite, in terms of how far it is from the brain, is a factor. The severity of the bite is a factor. The amount of virus to which the person is exposed is a factor. And the age and size of the victim is also a factor.

In a case like this, a four year old could potentially complete the full incubation period faster than an adult.

So let’s take the facts that have now been established and put them together. The boy was bitten on Saturday, which is “Day Zero.” Tuesday, “Day Three,” is the first day that the mother was able to get in touch with the health department. According to what she says, no one explained the procedure in dealing with rabies exposure to her until Wednesday, “Day Four,” by which time her son should have already received the first two shots. She called around lunch time on Thursday, “Day Five,” to let the health department know that she would agree to the shots, and by then, the meeting had taken place and the bears were already put down.

There’s a major breakdown in communication somewhere. It’s inconceivable to me that Wednesday would have been the first time anyone would have taken the time to explain what is involved in the rabies preventative treatment. It’s also inconceivable to me that at that point, she was even given the chance to think it over and let them know the following day.

At that point, what was there to think over? If she, by her own words, was willing to let her son undergo the shot regimen, why wasn’t that clear on Wednesday? Why wasn’t it clear on Tuesday? Why wasn’t it clear on the same Saturday that the bite occurred?

On Friday, test results came back negative for rabies, and Richmond Mayor Doug Wilder called for an investigation into how the incident was handled and whether negligence charges should be filed against the parent, whose attorney adds:

“Everyone has to live with it and accept it and not point fingers. If this is negligence on her part, then 80 percent of mothers and fathers in Richmond better take notice.”

Funny, but I always thought that pointing fingers is at least part of a lawyer’s job! I do believe that this was an accident. I think that this is one of those situations where a child didn’t realize how dangerous a situation he was in, and a parent who didn’t realize that her child had momentarily slipped away.

But what if a zookeeper had looked away for “a few seconds” and allowed a bear to slip out of its habitat, and the bear reached a child. Does anyone honestly believe no lawyers would be leaping through fire for the chance to point fingers in court? Can you picture any attorney just shaking his head and saying, “We just must live with it and accept it.”

As for the 80% figure her lawyer quoted, I hope 100% of parents take notice. If it only takes “a couple of seconds” for a child to scale one fence, battle through shrubbery to reach a chain link fence and stick his hand through to pet a bear, what else could a child do — like run out into a busy street without looking both ways, for example — in “a couple of seconds” while a parent isn’t watching?

The sad fact of life is that at times, we all lose sight of what we’re doing, we’re not careful every second. We’re not perfect. But look at the price that has to be paid for that imperfection, and look at how much is at risk when we sit back and say, “these things happen.”

I feel sorry for the child because in trying to pet a bear at an age that left him too young to really understand the danger, he unknowingly and unintentionally caused their deaths. What’s worse, he had to find out that they were dead because of that act.

When you consider the sadness and guilt he has to live with — even though he certainly didn’t intend to cause any harm at all — it somehow seems a little insincere to shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh, well, these things happen.”

I don’t think for a moment that either the parent or the child intended to cause this outcome. I’m sure there was no intention for the child to get bitten to start with. As others have pointed out, given the strength, size and unpredictability of bears, the fact that he only came away with a small puncture wound means that he was extraordinarily fortunate.

It could have been much worse for the child; it couldn’t have been any worse for the bears. And it was all because of an accident that could have been prevented.

As for the bears, they were first buried at an area landfill. That decision, which added salt to many people’s wounds in this situation, was made before the rabies test results were received. They have since been exhumed, and cremated, thanks to the donated services of a local pet crematory, and they will be interred at Maymont Park following a special memorial service this Saturday.

More than 300 mourners gathered at noon today to say their tearful goodbye to two black bears who delighted visitors to Maymont Park for a decade. The bears were euthanized this week after one of them bit a child. The child and a parent had breached a wooden fence to enter a restricted area in an apparent attempt to feed the bears an apple.

The event was organized by a local woman who loved the bears and Maymont Park, and who wanted to do something to honor the bears’ existence. A few Maymont veterinarians to whom the bears were members of their family fought back tears of their own as they addressed the crowd about the events of the past week.

The community has been expressing its outrage over the decision to put the bears down so that rabies tests could be performed. Brain tissue is required to test for rabies, which requires that the animal be killed: both bears tested negative for the virus.

Visitors this afternoon talked about watching the bears frolick in the sunshine and expressed their shock and dismay about the decision, which was made following several hours of deliberation among 14 experts including doctors, veterinarians, public health and wildlife officials from the state, the City of Richmond and Maymont itself.

Some brought stuffed animals — mostly teddy bears — and left them at a display wall outside the bear habitat. One person brought a jumbo-sized Winnie the Pooh.

Others brought flowers, even favorite photos of the two bears. Children who had visited the bears with their parents brought homemade cards and drawings.

Others, children and adults alike, signed large posters and cards with messages like, “We’ll miss you.” They talked with each other about their memories of visiting the bears with their families over the years.

Still others came to take in the scene of the empty exhibit, their sadness too deep to express with anything other than silent tears.

Mixed in with that sadness and shock is anger. Anger that’s directed at the unidentified parent that apparently put the child in harm’s way despite two signs on the very fence from which the child reached through that read, “WILD ANIMALS ARE DANGEROUS. DO NOT FEED.” Anger that’s directed towards the officials who made the decision to euthanize the bears rather than simply making the child undergo the standard rabies vaccination. And anger at this morning’s revelation that the remains of the bears were buried in an area landfill rather than on the park grounds.

(The burial was done before the test results were known, and because Maymont Park is city property, the bears could not have been buried there because of public health concerns if either animal had tested positive. Also, Maymont did not own the bears: they were merely licensed to display them by Virginia’s Game and Inland Fisheries Department.)

Richmond Mayor (and former Virginia Governor) Doug Wilder has promised a full investigation of what he has called “one of the most reprehensible as well as senseless things to have occurred.” He also said that the city would investigate whether the parent — whom officials refuse to name — might face any criminal charges, including negligence and trespassing.

“The Maymont facility is to attract kids to have an appreciation for wildlife…to show how animals are our friends,” Wilder said at a Friday afternoon press conference. “And this is how we reward our friends.”

As the investigation continues, I hope that the public won’t take their frustrations out on Maymont: it is clear from talking to the various workers at Maymont that that the entire staff is devastated by the situation, as much, if not more so than the many visitors to whom the bears brought such joy.

(All photos, except the shot of the two bears, taken by the author.)

Don’t forget to take the sidebar poll: How would you have handled the incident?

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?

Here’s a question for the parents in the audience:

Let’s suppose that you’re visiting a zoo with your four-year-old child. He’s excited to see all of the wild and exotic animals, and you’re watching him closely. He stops when he reaches a pair of bears and wants a closer look. The bears are enclosed within an eight foot fence, and outside of this fence is a seperate wooden “people fence” designed to keep visitors from getting too close to the cage. Your child wants to get “up close and personal” with the bears. You don’t work with the zoo, have never had any personal contact with the bears yourself, and don’t know whether they’re tame or not, beyond any obvious appearances.

Would you risk letting your child get close enough to touch a bear?

I’m hoping that most of you…scratch that: I’m hoping that every single one of you would say no, because when we’re talking about wild animals, the operative word is “wild.”

It’s been a sad week at one of my favorite places in Richmond, Maymont, where a parent apparently didn’t say no in such a scenario.

Part of the Maymont estate features a small zoological park that displays animals native to the James River area. The exhibit — prior to this week — featured two bears, ages 12 and 9, that had been at the park for years.

Despite warning signs, a parent and child breached a fence, according to WTVR-TV, the child stuck his hand through the inner ten-foot fence and was bitten by one of the bears. Though the wound required no stitches, the skin was broken, which allowed for the possibility that rabies could have been transmitted.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that a wildlife spokesperson has speculated that the child may have been eating an apple, or may have had the scent of an apple he had eaten recently, on his hands and this might have led to the bite.

So the two bears were euthanized (since the mother couldn’t identify which of the two had actually bitten the child) so that tests could be performed. The community, understandably, was outraged that such an act could result in the death of the two bears who were only guilty of doing what bears do.

There is no way to test an animal for rabies while it is alive. In bears, the illness is not completely predictable, and could have taken as long as 45 days to manifest itself in definitive symptoms. By that time, it would have been too late for the child to begin receiving treatment. And treatment — even as a preventative measure — requires a series of five shots over a 28-day period. And you can’t expect a four-year-old to undergo such an ordeal for doing what he was allowed to do: who would think a four-year-old would realize the danger if his parent helped him reach it to start with?

This morning, insult was added to injury: as nearly everyone expected, both bears tested negative for rabies.

A poll at the Times-Dispatch, as of this writing, indicates that 96% of people think the bears should not have been killed. I’m an animal lover and I find this story sickening. But I think there was no other reasonable choice to make sure that the child was safe from the rabies virus: you can’t subject a four-year-old to painful rabies shots for no reason just to save the bears’ lives: of the two, the child’s safety is paramount. No matter how many animals had to be put down, knowing that the child was safe should have been the only real deciding factor.

Two lives were lost here. Only human arrogance would pretend that the lives aren’t important because they’re “only” animals and that a bear isn’t one of God’s creatures just as the rest of us. The lives weren’t lost “needlessly” because the test results provided information that was urgently-needed; but the loss could have been so easily prevented with the use of even a drop of common sense.

A child was scarred, and those scars are potentially physical and mental. Zoos are designed to teach a love and appreciation of nature. And because this child was allowed to get too close, because these people violated the zoo’s safety measures specifically designed to protect visitors from just such an accident, others won’t get the chance to see these animals.

One simple act costs everyone.