• Have your pets vaccinated against rabies. Any pets which come in contact with wild animals are at risk. Many local health departments conduct public vaccination clinics for dogs and cats. Your veterinarian can also vaccinate your pet against rabies. D uring recent years, confirmed cases of rabies in cats have exceeded the reported cases in dogs in some parts of the United States making vaccination and booster shots critical to your health and that of your pets.
• If your cat or dog has been bitten or attacked by a wild animal or has bites or scratches of unknown origin, call your local health department or animal control officer to report the incident.
• If your cat or dog has bitten a person, call your local health department or animal control officer to report the incident.
• If your cat or dog is sick, seek the advice of your veterinarian.
• Protect your pets from stray or wild animals. Keep your pets from running loose.
• Report stray animals to your local health department so an animal control officer can investigate. Handling stray cats or dogs can be dangerous.
• Do not feed or handle wild animals especially those that appear aggressive or sick. Never keep a wild animal as a pet.
• A wild animal such as a bat, raccoon, fox, skunk, or groundhog which has bitten a person or domestic animal should be sacrificed immediately. Its head (or in the case of a bat, the entire bat) should be submitted to your state or county testing laboratory for examination. Rabies prophylaxis vaccinations may depend on your physician along with laboratory results.

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Rabies is a disease caused by a virus found in the saliva of infected animals and is transmitted to pets and humans by bites, or possibly by contamination of an open cut. Treatment of an infected person as critical. Untreated, rabies causes a painful death.

Most animals can be infected by the virus and can transmit the disease to man. Infected bats, raccoons, foxes, skunks, dogs or cats provide the greatest risk to humans. Rabies may also spread through exposure to infected domestic farm animals, groundhogs , weasels and other wild carnivores. Squirrels, rodents and rabbits are seldom infected.