USA – Cats – Rabies. A discussion

Raccoon being vaccinated against rabies. Photo US Dept of Agriculture.
Raccoon being vaccinated against rabies. Photo of raccoon by US Dept of Agriculture. Photo of tag by davedehetre.

If a cat has rabies blame people, not the cat.

In the USA, people who like to criticize domestic, stray and feral cats often raise the topic of rabies. They say all domestic cats should be kept inside and all stray and feral cats should be exterminated. In support of their argument they say that stray and feral cats are sometimes rabid, which causes alarm amongst people. These comments damage the image of the cat but the sad fact is that rabies in cats is on the rise (we are told²). I’d like to see if I can put some balance back into the argument.

General Background

Curbing and controlling rabies

Is it fair to say that the federal and state governments, of America, could do more to prevent and even extinguish rabies in the USA? I fully understand that it is more difficult to control rabies in a large country such as the USA which is not an island. The UK’s success in eradicating rabies is in part because it is an island nation.

Yet, looking at Europe one discovers that Germany has been declared rabies free since 2008, as has Belgium. The Netherlands has been rabies free since 1923. These countries are connected by land to other European countries. A comparable state in the USA would be, for example, Virginia where there were 572 cases of rabies in 2009. None of the US states are rabies free. Clearly there is more to consider in respect of preventative measures than simply being surrounded by water.

Subject to a decent counter argument I have to conclude that the US could do more to control rabies. This is about people, not cats.

Historical Stuff

We are told that rabies was rare in the northern states of the US but since the 1970s there has been a rabies epidemic amongst raccoons in those states. The reason? Hunters who transported infected raccoons from the south to the north. The actions of people exacerbated the rabies problem in the USA.

Bats

Between 1980 and 1997 there were 22 documented cases of rabies amongst people. Of these 19 were caused by bats (86%). That puts some perspective into the cat rabies discussion.


Lists of posts about Rabies on PoC


Rabies – Dogs versus Cats

Cats are 3.7 times more likely to be rabid than dogs (81 dogs versus 300 cats in USA in 2009)². Why is this? There are two obvious reasons and both are exclusively to do with….you guessed it, people.

Vaccinations – visits to vet

Although there are a similar number of cats and dogs in the USA (74m cats to 70m dogs¹), people with dogs take their companion animal to the vet far more frequently than do cat owners and they spend far more money than cat owners.

  • dog vet visits: 2.6 per year (2012)
  • cat vet visits: 1.6 per year (2012)
  • dog vet expenditure per dog per year (2012): $227
  • cat vet expenditure per cat per year (2012): $90
  • **36% of USA cat-owning households did not visit a veterinarian in 2006¹**.

The figures suggest that cat owners care less about their cat’s health than dog owner’s do about their dog’s health. This almost certainly translates to an occasional failure to vaccinate against rabies. Once again the cause of increased rabies amongst cats is people and irresponsible cat caretaking.

I presume rabies vaccinations for companion animals is obligatory in the USA, on a state by state basis, but the obligation is not properly enforced. When a cat is taken across the state border there should be a rabies vaccination certificate but this doesn’t stop cats contracting rabies in the state where they live.

The lack of a complete vaccination program for cats is compounded by cat caretakers letting their unvaccinated cats roam free where they can contract the disease from the wild cat species reservoir.

Conclusion

Admittedly, it is tough to control rabies in the USA but I sense more can be done to control it at various levels and in various ways and this is in the hands of people. The rabid cat is the messenger of irresponsible cat ownership.

If cat haters and people who dislike cats want to criticize an animal they should direct it at the human species.

Reference:

  1. AVMA
  2. CDC

12 thoughts on “USA – Cats – Rabies. A discussion”

  1. The author of the best comment will receive an Amazon gift of their choice at Christmas! Please comment as they can add to the article and pass on your valuable experience.
  2. Great article. This is an interesting post to read, I really learned from this. BTW, if anyone needs to fill out a Rabies Vaccine Certificate, I found a blank form here http://goo.gl/qAnu52. This site PDFfiller also has some tutorials how to fill it out and a few related forms that you might find useful.

  3. So, it is the bat that is the big worry and not the cat. Why doesn’t the local and federal governments do something about rabies in bats?

  4. If the number of cases of rabies in cats and people is massively under-reported as you claim, isn’t this a human failure and doesn’t that support my argument that it is people who should be blamed and not the cat?

  5. Note: this is a summarised and rewritten comment from Woody (MoreThanWikiEducated is Woody). I have done this because he makes a point worth addressing but can’t express himself without being abusive. Sad really.

    You can’t supervise cats outside sufficiently to ensure that they don’t make contact with any half-alive rabid bat that has tried to find a place to hide and die.

  6. Note: this is a summarised and rewritten comment from Woody (MoreThanWikiEducated is Woody). I have done this because he makes a point worth addressing but can’t do it without being rude and insulting.

    The CDC can only report confirmed rabies cases. This means only those cases where the antibodies developed in the human blood before the vaccine for rabies is given or after a human has died from rabies and the brain tissue was examined for the virus. If they try to detect the antibodies for rabies after a person received the required shot regimen, they have no way of knowing if the person developed the rabies’ antibodies from a cat’s rabies virus, or from the required rabies shots after a cat scratch or cat bite. So it cannot be a “confirmed” cat-to-human transmitted rabies case if any rabies vaccines were given to the human.

    There are literally hundreds of thousands of cases EVERY YEAR where people are required to get rabies vaccines from contact with suspected rabid cats, and even more necessary if that cat cannot be trapped and quarantined to watch if it dies from rabies or have it destroyed for the test.

    So those piddly 300 cat cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

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