Rabies: What Every Dog and Cat Owner Should Know

Rabies is unusual among the diseases pet owners deal with, because it is not primarily about your pet. It is fatal once symptoms appear, there is no treatment at that stage, and it kills people, mostly children, mostly through dog bites.

It is also completely preventable with a vaccine that costs very little. Few things in veterinary medicine offer that much for that little.

How it spreads

Through saliva, usually a bite. Less commonly through a scratch or saliva contacting broken skin or eyes, nose or mouth. Dogs are the main source of human cases, but cats, bats and other mammals also carry it.

The virus travels along nerves to the brain, which is why the incubation period varies so widely, from weeks to months. A bite on the face progresses faster than one on the foot, simply because the distance is shorter.

The signs in an animal

Rabies does not always look like the film version. It usually passes through phases:

• Early: a change in temperament. A friendly animal becomes withdrawn or irritable; a shy one becomes unusually affectionate. Often dismissed as a mood.
• Furious phase: restlessness, aggression, biting at objects, roaming, sensitivity to light and sound.
• Paralytic phase: drooling because swallowing is paralysed, a dropped jaw, a changed bark, weakness progressing to paralysis, then death.

Not every case shows the furious phase. Some animals go quiet and paralysed, which is why "it was not aggressive" does not rule rabies out.

If a person is bitten

This is the part worth memorising, because the first fifteen minutes matter.

1. Wash the wound immediately with soap under running water for a full fifteen minutes. This alone substantially reduces the risk, and almost nobody washes for long enough.
2. Apply an antiseptic such as povidone iodine or alcohol.
3. Go to a hospital straight away. Post-exposure treatment works, but only before symptoms start. Do not wait to see what happens.
4. Do not stitch the wound closed unless a doctor decides otherwise.
5. Identify and confine the animal if it can be done safely. A dog that is alive and well ten days later was not shedding virus at the time of the bite, which is genuinely useful information for the doctors.
6. Do not kill the animal unless instructed. Observation is more informative.

Post-exposure treatment is a course of vaccine, sometimes with immunoglobulin. It is highly effective and it is not optional after a suspicious bite.

Vaccinating your pet

• First dose at 12 weeks or older
• Boosters as your vet advises, usually annually here
• Cats need it too. Indoor cats included, because bats and rodents get indoors and cats hunt them

Keep the certificate. Kennels, groomers, travel, export and any bite investigation will all ask for it, and reconstructing a lost vaccination history is far harder than photographing a card.

Why this matters beyond your household

Vaccinating dogs is the intervention that ends human rabies deaths. Not treating people after bites, though that saves individuals, but removing the reservoir in the dog population. When a large enough share of dogs in an area is vaccinated, transmission stops.

That makes your pet's rabies shot one of the few pieces of veterinary care with a direct public benefit. It protects the child down the road as much as your own animal.

Practical points

• A vaccinated dog can still be bitten by a rabid animal. If that happens, tell your vet; a booster is usually given.
• Stray dogs and puppies of unknown origin should be vaccinated as soon as they are old enough, not once they have settled in.
• Do not handle wildlife behaving strangely, particularly bats, and do not let your pets do so either.
• Report suspected cases. A suspicious animal is a neighbourhood problem, not a private one.

Rabies is the clearest example of veterinary care that is trivially cheap in advance and catastrophic to skip. The obstacle is almost never disbelief; it is that an annual booster is easy to defer when nothing appears to be wrong and the money has somewhere else to be this month.

Every Skeepy Pet HMO plan pays for yearly core vaccine boosters, rabies included, at any vet clinic in Nigeria, so the booster stops being an annual decision and becomes something that simply happens.