Rabid

Yesterday, late afternoon, my poodle was bitten.

The crime against my poodle (or “puddle” as our Serbian friend calls her) was committed by a coyote.  Because we live in the boonies now.

Boonies filled with coyotes.  And javelina.

And dumb puddles who think it’s fun to run away when you call them back to the house and its safety.

Dumb puddle.

Fortunately the lumbering giant of a Great Dane of our household was able to scare the coyote away, leaving two puncture wounds and a bloody tear on the back of our toy puddle.

I called the vet, got an appointment for this morning, and learned they’re going to give her a booster rabies shot because there’s been a rabies outbreak in the area.

I tucked the dog into its bed.  I tucked the kids into their beds.

Then I spent my evening wondering how quickly a dog could get rabies and whether the puddle was going to wake up in the middle of the night foaming at the mouth and attack my children innocently sleeping on the futon nearby.  (Thank goodness Tres sleeps in a pack ‘n play, I’m going to assume Gerber makes their play pen walls strong enough to withstand a rabid, ravaging puddle.)

Google, the World Wide Web and Wikipedia are magical entities.  Don’t know how I ever did without them.

The good news is that symptoms will likely not appear in the puddle for at least a week – if at all, so going to the vet today will take care of the rabies problem quite nicely.

The scary news I found while researching (because we know researching life-threatening things on the internet is absolutely foolproof): if you wake up and there’s a bat in the room with your child, you should always get the rabies shots in the belly just in case the bat bit them.

I know for a fact there are bats in camps all across the U.S. that sleep in the dorms with the kids.  I can’t imagine how that would pan out!

Fun times, fun times! It’s a barrel of monkeys all the time around here!