Originally published at: Baseball fan caught a live raccoon at the stadium with his bare hands | Boing Boing
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Well yeah. That’s the main reason to be fearful of getting too close to raccoons—not because they’ll rip you to pieces, but because they can spread rabies. Even people who aren’t “avid outdoorsmen” know this.
I hope he was at least able to get the raccoon signed afterward.
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Would’ve been easier to buy a hotdog and just give it to him, save you the rabies shot.
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What an idiot. This is the equivalent of a dumbass in a bro-dozer claiming to be an “avid off-road enthusiast”.
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Is he Out or Safe?
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You know, he had the raccoon right there. They could have tested it to see if it was rabid and saved him the shots (of course, that means killing the raccoon.)
I once read that a lot of avid raccoon hunters in the Ozarks test positive for rabies antibodies, simply from being exposed to them.
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Does it mean killing the raccoon? I tried picking up what I thought was a neighbor’s lost cat (turned out to be a local TNR cat) and after she sunk her fangs in as far as she could, I knew I couldn’t let her go.
She spent 10 days at the local Humane Society and they set her free once she was cleared for rabies. But maybe it is different for raccoons. Also, not much rabies in my state.
(as for the cat, we got along fine after that, I just never tried to pick her up again. )
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I think that’s what they did ages ago, brain autopsy, maybe not necessary anymore.
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I experienced something very similar two weeks ago but the raccoon was in my barn pursuing one of my chickens and I had nothing handy to defend them with other than my actual hands. So one grabbed tail, bit hand, and swiftly dispatched trash panda later and I just wrapped up my rabies shots last week. The doctor and I were joking about how the shots are nowhere near the horror show we were both promised as kids.
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My understanding is this:
- If you want to know if an animal has rabies you can keep it under observation to see if it develops symptoms.
- If you want to know if an animal has rabies quickly enough to determine whether the person it bit will need a rabies shot then you may need to perform a necropsy of the brain.
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What a complainer. When I had to get shots for rabies, it was a giant fuck-you needle through the stomach and into the spine, every single day, for a week until they caught the dog that bit me. I was a very unhappy four year old.
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I mean, they all wear bandit masks. I’m surprised he didn’t steal a base. 
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Had a face to face encounter with a raccoon in my backyard last night.
I was grilling. She was hunting.
We’re cool.
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Poor thing was just lost. He meant to be at a ballgame in Huntsville, Alabama, home of the Rocket City Trash Pandas. (Angels AA affiliate)
Hope somebody gave him a ride.
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Many years ago I had to deport a problem raccoon from an island in Maine. Long story short, I cornered it and placed it in a box. What a bundle of fury! Although I was deeply padded and covered it still bit thru. This was before rabies existed, so we just poured gin on – and drank it too.
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“Instead, the “gold standard” of rabies testing is testing the animal’s brain, including its cerebellum and brain stem, Dr. Leyi Wang, a veterinary virologist at the University of Illinois, told me. If an animal has rabies, you will definitely find the virus in its brain. This test, called a direct fluorescent antibody test, is thought to have never failed to detect rabies in an animal. And you need to be 100 percent sure if an animal has rabies or not, because rabies is nearly 100 percent fatal in humans once an infection has established itself. This is not a situation where we can afford to risk false negatives. If someone has been bitten, they have to go get a series of shots that will prevent the virus from making itself at home in their brain. But once the infection has taken hold, there is currently no reliable treatment. (Options like the Milwaukee Protocol, which saved one person’s life in 2004 by way of inducing a coma, do not usually work.)”
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I don’t mean to brag, OK yes I do. I caught a raccoon barehanded by grabbing him by the hair on the back of his head. He didn’t like it and pooped and peed all over everything. I was driving a friends kid home from babysitting when 2 small coons ran across the road and up the back side of a tree along the road. We suddenly decided to catch them. I could see where one was hiding so I reached around the tree and by chance caught him by the only place where he couldn’t bite or scratch me. He was MUCH bigger than they looked while running. I was actually afraid to put him down, so I threw him in the back of my van and he hid behind a hay bale. I figured I’d set a live trap to catch him in the morning, but by then he’d ripped out a nest of wires under the dashboard which took 3 days to replace. I kept him in a cage for about a week feeding him fish and dog food, but we never hit it off so I let him loose. please don’t tell me to never do that no more. thanks 
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This sounds like they wanted to call the team the Rocket City Raccoons but knew they’d fall afoul of a certain Mouse and so did a quick end-around.
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