Ummm..The ferret had been biten by wild rats, eh?
 
Did you know that when doing research on what species had been found with
positive rabies tests, not a single rat was listed....As a matter of fact,
the only rodents listed at all with rabies were between 1-2 rabbits and/or
ground squirrels a year...This is from the CDC themselves.....
 
Rabies isn't much of a concern in wild rats, but contact with their fleas
is....
 
Rabies is more of a concern with raccoons, skunks, bats, domestic dogs and
cats.  And even then it is often overblown since.  as an example only
roughly 5000 raccoons were found with rabies and mostly in upstate New York
in one year ...The outbreaks are often localized and the chances of a human
getting rabies from these animals is very low... The chances of getting
rabies from a bite from a wild animal are 1,000,000 to 1 in normal
situations, since many people are biten each year while hunting, camping,
helping injured wildlife, etc...With domestic animals, just with dogs, over
800,000 people a year are biten badly enough to need medical
attention..Roughly between 500 to 1500 dogs a year in the US are found
positive for rabies...out of posibly 3+ billion dogs....About 1 ferret in
4-5 years has been found positive for rabies (nearly every case from giving
the wrong vacine) out of (hard to estimate numbers of ferrets) maybe 800
million to 1 billion ferrets in the nation...
 
I've done volunteer work in a zoo as an ast zookeeper and while they used to
require zookeepers and their ast.  zookeepers to be vacinated for rabies,
now only the vets are required to have it.  Rabies is simply too rare these
days for zoos to trouble themselves with..and noone suggests killing a
monkey, cat or whatever in a zoo when a keeper gets bitten...The keepers
often don't even report minor nips from small animals...So if zoos are
fairly unconcerned with wild or captive bred exotics, why the fuss over a
ferret nip?  I've been personaly niped by feeder mice when feeding reptiles
and never think twice about it...(yeah right..a bat is going to sneak into a
cage and bite a feeder mouse..Bleh!)
 
I think its either some personal bias that people have against ferrets that
would make people demand their death for rabies testing...Shear ignorance on
the part of animal control officers who hear too many stories about rabid
skunks and think skunk=ferret (while the two are in the same family, they
differ geneticaly quite a bit)...or maybe animal rights people working
towards a big excuse to make all pets illegal by making wild claims of
rabies to scare pet owners and use as a weapon to pass bills to regulate the
pet industry to death..Such as they tried in certain areas already...Note
their attempts to make exotic pets illegal in Texas (even including
hedgehogs and ferrets), which luckily failed due to the exotics industry
asking just where the suddenly illegal animals were supposed to GO?  The
zoos and rescue facilities refused to touch them as they would have been
buried and they already lack the funding...But I'm off track a bit here...
 
The idea of rats passing rabies to anything, including ferrets is just
Hollywood Horror Movie fantasy....There have been no confirmed cases of
rabies in wild or domestic rats that I can find anywhere...And no cases of
pet rats who have nipped their owners ever tested positive for rabies
ever...While the fleas are a problem in wild rodents and one whould not
handle wild deer mice or their droppings due to illnesses carried by them,
rabies is not a worry....
 
Jazmyn - (25+ years experiance working with rats and other small rodents)
 
Rat FAQ http://www.firstlight.net/nala/ratfaq.html
Gambian Giant Pouched Rats http://www.firstlight.net/nala/gprat.html
[Posted in FML issue 2043]