Hunting and Trapping
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BURLINGTON,
Vt.––Haunting the woods of the east and upper midwest,
they’re at large again, clamping their jaws on any animal they
encounter, usually causing a lingering painful death.
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Photograph courtesy Animal Welfare Institute |
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resurgance of raccoon trapping over the past winter, nationally measured
in the tens of thousands, and a resurgence of raccoon rabies, measured
by hundreds of detected cases, are both officially associated with an
alleged recovery of raccoon populations, after a crash attributed to
rabies and harsh winters in the early 1990s.
Roadkill survey data, however, doesn’t support wildlife agency claims that raccoons are increasing. Roadkills of both raccoons and other species have crashed since 1993, according to the Dr. Splatt roadkill surveys, coordinated each spring by science teacher Brewster Bartlett, of Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire. The Dr. Splatt data is collected by students at more than 100 middle schools across the U.S.––the majority of them in the northeast, where both raccoon trapping and raccoon rabies are most prevalent. According to the Strah Polls, conducted year-round by road department secretary Cathy Strah, of Mentor, Ohio, the raccoon population in that area was stable in 1993-1994, peaked in 1995, and last year fell back to just slightly more than the previous norm. |
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| What is up––sharply––is raccoon trapping, driven by fast-rising Asian demand. Raccoon pelts that fetched just $8.00 at auction in 1994 reportedly brought almost $21.00 average this spring. Unsold stocks from the early 1990s are finally gone. Buyer interest from the Asian fur garment manufacturing centers, especially Hong Kong, appears to be up because of speculation. Pelt buyers are gambling not only that U.S. and European retail fur sales will rebound from a nine-year decline, but also that the supply of pelts from North American species will be restricted by the pending European Community ban on imports of furs from leghold-trapped species.. | 
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The speculators are betting, in effect, that the import ban will be
imposed at last in June, after two postponements, despite the concerted
efforts of the U.S., Canada, and Russia to undo it
Rising pelt prices correspondingly stimulated trapping across North America last winter. Among the first states to report final season statistics, Missouri sold 4,500 trapping permits, up from the recent low of 2,500 in 1994, albeit still well below the 8,500 of a decade ago. Michigan had 13,500 trappers, fewer than the 18,000 of a decade ago, but up 25% in a year. Wherever rabies was, it has reappeared more-or-less proportionately. In New York, for instance, also reporting a rise in trapping, 360 positive rabies tests were recorded through April 1997, about half in raccoons––a 20% increase from the first four months of 1996. New York, first hit by raccoon rabies in 1990, found a peak incidence of rabies in 1993, with 2,746 cases of all rabies strains combined, out of 11,900 animals tested. That set a new national record. The numbers have since declined, but New York again led the nation in positive findings in 1996, with 1,084 cases detected among 9,000 animals tested. One case of the raccoon rabies strain appeared in a goat who was on exhibit at the Tioga County Fair, attended by 25,000 people. Fortunately the only public exposure was believed to have been when the goat was led down the midway for judging. Connecticut, first hit in 1991, had 133 rabies cases during the first four months of 1997, up from 57 in 1996. Raccoons, again, were the most afflicted species. Climbing raccoon pelt prices likewise paralleled the spread of raccoon rabies northward after 1976, when a group of West Virginia raccoon hunters and trappers translocated 3,500 raccoons from a part of Florida where raccoon rabies has persisted for more than 40 years, trying to rebuild the hunted-out local population. Afterward, while state wildlife agencies urged trappers and coonhunters to kill as many raccoons as possible, rabies advanced at about 50 miles per year. From 1977 through 1987, trappers in West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey killed more than 500,000 raccoons per year. Hunters killed as many more. Yet rabies kept spreading because the killing both obliged raccoons to wander farther in search of mates and opened habitat, encouraging large litters. Rabies typically kills raccoons, like humans, within days of the appearance of active symptoms, but the latency period before symptoms show in either raccoons or humans is often around two months, and can be up to six month––long enough for an infected raccoon to mate and raise rabid offspring. The pandemic momentum slowed only when it reached Connecticut and Massachusetts, where trapping was comparatively quite light, even though the raccoon population was denser: up to 300 raccoons per square mile in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where the first and most cases of raccoon rabies in Connecticut were found. By the mid-1980s, Dr. William Winkler of the National Centers for Disease Control warned in the National Academy of Sciences’ handbook Control of Rabies: “Persistant trapping or poisoning campaigns as a means to rabies control should be abolished. There is no evidence that these costly and politically attractive programs reduce either wildlife reservoirs or rabies incidence.” |
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| By January 1994, even the conservative National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians acknowledged the point. “Continuous and persistent government-funded programs for trapping or poisoning wildlife are not cost effective in reducing wildlife rabies reservoirs on a statewide basis,” the 1994 NASPHV Compendium of Animal Rabies Control stipulated. |
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compendium appeared in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical
Association, and seemed to mark a change. With raccoon pelt prices at
their lowest level in half a century, reported rabies cases declined
over the next several years in most regions.
At the border Hoping to keep the current raccoon rabies outbreak out of Quebec, the Quebec government picked up $110,000 of the reported $150,000 cash cost of distributing 70,000 baited oral rabies vaccination capsules across Franklin, Lamoille, and Grand Isle Counties in northern Vermont during the second week in May. Vermont hoped to get federal aid to cover the balance of the cash outlay. The capsules are a sort of fish meal sandwich, containing a vaccine dose in a wax capsule, genetically engineered to be absorbable only by raccoons. Ontario, sharing the New York border, within an hour’s drive of Vermont, assisted in kind, furnishing the plane to drop the capsules, two pilots, two navigators, three rabies specialists to provide technical help, and the operator of the airborne bait-spreading machine. Earlier, Ontario spread 400,000 vaccination doses across upstate New York; New York paid for three-fourths, Ontario for the balance. |
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The May vaccine drop, supervised by Cornell University, the USDA, and the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife, came after rabid bobcats attacked two humans, 45 miles apart, on April 28 and 29 in Delaware County, New York. |
Photograph courtesy Feline Conservation Center |
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80-year-old Roxbury man was bitten eight times before the attacking
bobcat took off in pursuit of a domestic housecat, was cornered in a
garage, and was shot. A day later, a 13-year-old boy was bitten on the
thumb and arm after a bobcat followed him into a Hancock elementary
school from the playground, as he and other boys tried to summon an
adult. Shaking the bobcat off, the boy reportedly then tried to strangle
the cat, before an adult intervened and killed the cat himself. Both
attacks came in urban areas, not usual bobcat habitat, and both bobcats
carried raccoon rabies. Raccoons are a staple prey of bobcats.
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| The vaccine drop is to be repeated in the fall, to vaccinate young raccoons who may not have been weaned in May. Using 60 pieces of bait per square kilometre, it was billed as a field test of the vaccination method, following successful trials in the St. Lawrence Valley of New York, the Cape May area in New Jersey, and around the Cape Cod Canal in Massachusetts, where Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine staff and volunteers have distributed 20,000 vaccination pellets annually since 1994. |  |
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19 cases of raccoon rabies have been found within six miles of the
vaccination zone on the mainland side of the canal, none have been
reported on the Cape side. Air distribution of oral rabies vaccinations
has been used successfully against fox rabies in Europe for nearly 20
years. Adopting the technique early, Ontario has cut confirmed fox
rabies cases in the province from 600 in 1980 to 15 last year.
Quebec, by contrast, has done relatively little about fox rabies. While the raccoon rabies outbreak has spread north, fox rabies has several times spread south from Quebec into the U.S., mostly through Vermont. Rabies apparently does not move easily from New York into Canada, or vice versa, except possibly through the Champlain Valley, south of Montreal, because the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes form a natural obstacle to land animals from Massena, New York, to Duluth, Minnesota. Vermont DFW officials and counterparts in the state agriculture department were apparently not above playing politics with the vaccination effort, reportedly warning members of the anti-leghold trapping group EndTrap that a trap ban would prevent vaccine dropping. The apparent implication was that the DFW and agriculture department would obstruct the vaccine drop should leghold trapping be banned, so as to rouse fear of rabies toward getting the ban rescinded. There seems to be little chance, however, that the anti-leghold trap ban EndTrap has long pursued will escape the statehouse committees where it has remained blocked for 11 years. Some of the same Vermont officials influenced the Burlington board of health to hire a trapper to kill raccoons among a cluster of vacant hunting and fishing camps on the north side of town, which reputedly shelter a huge raccoon population. Ninety percent of the raccoons were said to be rabid. A raccoon rabies outbreak did appear to spread from that neighborhood into surrounding Colchester, Winooski, and Milton. However, of 31 raccoons caught between April 18 and May 12, only 12 were even deemed worth testing for rabies, and just six of them were rabid. Finally heeding warnings from Judy Anderson of Vermont Wildlife Rehabilitators that killing raccoons merely opens habitat, attracting more raccoons into proximity with rabies carriers, the Burlington board of health called the effort off. Translocation Rabies is moving both north and west. Maine had only 10 cases in 1994, but had 101 in 1995, 131 in 1996, and 84 by late April 1997. About two-thirds were raccoons. Skunks and foxes, still carrying a rabies strain that arrived from Quebec circa 1980, accounted for most of the rest. As concern increased, police in Westbrook, Maine in October 1996 reloaded their sidearms with birdshot, to avoid richochets when dispatching raccoons, and on May 9 authorized animal control officer David Sparks to use blue flashing emergency lights on his car when responding to rabies calls. Despite a year of public education about rabies, however, Westbrook discovered a crisis on May 12: seven children, ages of six to 12, found a dead raccoon the day before, dissected it as some apparently learned to do in school, and tried to remove its teeth, coming into intimate contact with blood and saliva. Either could carry the rabies virus––and police who later picked up the carcass had it incinerated before knowing children had handled it. Ohio had just two rabies cases in 1996, but as raccoon rabies hit, Mahoning County alone had 15 in the first 110 days of 1997. In one case a rabid raccoon had contact with five people, including a three-year-old boy. All received post-exposure vaccination. |
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Ohio had just two rabies cases in 1996, but as raccoon rabies hit, Mahoning County alone had 15 in the first 110 days of 1997. In one case a rabid raccoon had contact with five people, including a three-year-old boy. All received post-exposure vaccination. |
Illustration of rabies carriers courtesy Linda Stannard |
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As 20 years ago, some of the current rabies outbreaks may result from
translocation. In mid-May, for instance, a homeowner shot a rabid
raccoon who had injured his vaccinated dogs in a backyard altercation
near Chapel Hill in Orange County, North Carolina. The raccoon was the
35th confirmed case of rabies in Orange County since July 1996, when the
disease spread from neighboring Chatham County, which had only three
cases in 1996 but had already identified 86 cases just in 1997. This was
about a third of the state total.
Chapel Hill, however, is miles from any previous cases.text “I don’t know how that raccoon got there,” Orange County animal control officer John Sauls told reporter Todd Nelson, of the Raleigh News & Observer. “Unless somebody dropped that raccoon off or it escaped from some sort of enclosure, it tells us we can’t track the periphery of the epidemic as well as we thought we could.” As many as 50 people required post-exposure rabies vaccinations in Morrisville, North Carolina, after handling puppies from a litter that included at least one confirmed rabies case. Five of the seven-member litter jointly dragged a raccoon carcass into their owner’s yard in early April. Three puppies in all were killed for testing, one was killed by a car, and two were given away before the raccoon incident. Morrisville is in Wake County, which at that point had dealt with 77 rabies cases since July 1994: six in pets, 62 in raccoons (21 in 1995, 41 in 1996), and the rest in bats and foxes. |
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| North Carolina, a raccoon rabies hotspot in the early 1970s, before the West Virginia translocation, had just nine cases of rabies in 1990, but had 176 in 1994, 467 in 1995, and 741 in 1996, expecting to record 1,500 this year, with outbreaks reported in 59 of 100 counties. |  |
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the 1996 cases, 581 involved raccoons. Also afflicted were 50 foxes, 47
skunks, 29 cats, 12 bats, 10 dogs, three horses, a cow, and a rabbit.
Responsibility for coping with rabies in North Carolina is split between state public health veterinarian Lee Hunter and Todd McPherson, chief of virology at the state Laboratory of Public Health. Both have reportedly stretched resources to the limit: the lab, set up to test 1,400 animals a year, expects to test 5,900 in 1997, even after tightening criteria for testing. Small rodents and rabbits are no longer tested because they rarely carry rabies for long before dying. Raccoon rabies most often infects humans through an intermediary, such as a free-roaming cat or dog. Thus in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, health officials in February sent out 2,500 warnings to neighbors of the Norristown State Hospital, after a rabid cat bit a woman outside a nearby home, and tried to catch and kill the estimated 25 cats who lived on the hospital grounds. They reportedly caught 17. But despite the potential for rabies crossing over through cats and dogs, it rarely occurs. Rabid raccoons have appeared around Arlington, Virginia for nearly 20 years, yet a free-roaming cat who scratched or bit a woman and two children in early April was the first rabid cat found there in about 40 years. Westchester County, New York, has had rabid raccoons since 1990, but the first rabid dog there in 40 years wasn’t detected until December 4, 1996. Since 1992, 308 of the 351 Massachusetts cities and towns have reported rabid raccoons, but a rabid dog found circa December 1, 1996, was the first in the state since 1949. Until the northern spread of the mid-Atlantic states raccoon rabies pandemic, U.S. rabies outbreaks came mostly in the south. But except in North Carolina, southern raccoon rabies outbreaks have been relatively small and self-contained. Although raccoons are heavily hunted with dogs in the south, as in much of the northeast, they are not trapped in high volume in the south because below the snowbelt they don’t grow thick winter coats. Kentucky had a recorded high of 62 rabies cases in 1992, but only 20 in 1993, had 43 in 1996, and had only nine during the first four months of 1997. Paradoxically, the most human post-exposure cases in Kentucky, 230, were recorded during 1994, when the disease was evidently at low ebb. Post-exposure treatment often becomes necessary not because a person has been bitten by a confirmed rabid animal, but rather because the animal either can’t be located or has been dispatched by a means such as bludgeoning or shooting in the head which precludes testing brain tissue to see if rabies is present. Dade County, Florida, hadn’t had a confirmed rabies case since two rabid raccoons were found in 1994, but another rabid raccoon turned up in late March, picked up by a motorist who thought he was an accident victim and identified by veterinarian Jorge Larin. Volusia County, Florida, had six rabies cases last summer: three in foxes, one each in a raccoon, a bobcat, and a kitten. Chase pens Confirming the value of aerially distributing oral rabies vaccine pellets, Texas reports headway against a canine rabies epizootic underway in 21 southern counties since 1988, when it apparently entered from Mexico. Statewide, Texas had 351 rabies cases in 1996 among 11,371 animals tested, down from 590 cases in 13,814 tested in 1995. Only 13 coyotes and six dogs tested positive in 1996, down from 75 coyotes and 36 dogs a year earlier. The major carriers in 1996 were bats, involved in 120 cases; skunks, 78 cases; and gray foxes, 59 cases, down the 134 cases a year earlier. Texas has air-dropped vaccination pellets three times since 1995, initially hitting 29 counties, expanding coverage to 77 counties this year. The Texas pellets use dog food as bait rather than fish meal, to attract coyotes and foxes rather than raccoons. The vaccination rate among wild coyotes in the target areas is estimated at 75%; 70% vaccination of a population at risk is believed to be the minimum necessary to squelch an epidemic. The program costs about $4 million a year. Before the air drops began, two Texans died of canine rabies: a Starr County woman in 1991, and a Hidalgo County boy in 1994. The spread of the disease was reportedly accelerated by hunters who translocated foxes and coyotes to be chased with hounds in closed pens. |
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A rabid Texas coyote infected an Alabama hound in December 1993. Then, in 1994, eight dogs got rabies at a Florida chase pen, obliging 26 people to receive post-rabies vaccination, while a 20-square-mile area was placed under animal transport quarantine. |
Photograph of coyote courtesy Art Wolfe |
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Advisories against translocating foxes and coyotes for chase pen use
eventually came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
American Veterinary Medical Association, the Council of State and
Territorial Epidemiologists, the National Association of State Public
Health Veterinar-ians, the Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife
Agencies, and the International Association of Fish and Wildlife
Agencies.
Skunks, bats Skunks are the primary rabies carriers in the midwest, accounting for 144 of 237 rabid animals found in 1996. Only 141 rabid animals were found in Iowa in 1995, before trapping rebounded, and just 90 in 1994, when trapping was lowest. The Arkansas Department of Health has posted rabies alerts in Benton, Boone, Logan, and Scott counties, which have 18 of the 40 cases of rabies reported in the state over the past 12 months. Sixteen of the 18 cases involved skunks, as have 26 cases overall. Other victims included a cat, a cow, a dog, a pet ferret, and several bats. Bat rabies remains the most widely distributed form and the most deadly to humans, in part because bat bites tend to resemble insect bites, and victims are often bitten unawares. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on May 9 that neither Linda Bow, 42, of Cumberland County, Kentucky, who died in October 1996, nor a 49-year-old man from Missoula County, Montana, who died in December, had any recollection of contact with bats, found in the chimney of Bow’s home and near the mill where the man worked. Both died of a rabies strain carried by silver-haired bats. The warning was precipitated in part by an incident in Broward County, Florida, in which 13 children petted and played with a bat who died of rabies two days later. The public got another heads-up about bat rabies in early April, when Washington governor Gary Locke, his wife, and their month-old daughter Emily all received post-exposure vaccinations. Locke had discovered a bat at the governor’s mansion in Olympia while changing the baby’s diaper. He chased the bat into the mansion ballroom, but the bat disappeared before exterminators arrived. Several days later, Locke chased a bat out an open window. None of the family appeared to have been bitten, but two Washingtonians have died of bat rabies in the past two years, a 65-year-old Shelton man on January 19 and a four-year-old Lewis County girl on March 16, 1995, and the Lockes were not inclined to take chances. |
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Of the 22 human rabies cases contracted in the U.S. since 1980, 19 have
involved bat rabies. All forms of rabies can be successfully treated
post-exposure, but the treatment must start within 14 days of the bite.
Oregon officials were meanwhile puzzled by their 56th reported case of rabies over the past decade––a cat, in rural Douglas County, found December 29, who apparently contracted bat rabies when most bats were hibernating. Free rabies vaccinations were given to the pets of about 200 local residents. |
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Photograph of brown bat courtesy C.D. Grondahl |
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reminder of the importance of vaccinating pets came in April from
Littleton, New Hampshire, where all members of two families received
post-exposure vaccination and 31 pets were killed, including 14 cats,
nine mice, five hamsters, and three gerbils, after one cat was found to
be rabid. Eleven previously vaccinated dogs also received post-exposure
shots, while six puppies were placed in a six-month quarantine. Ten days
earlier, 14 people received post-exposure shots in Cross City, Florida,
after being bitten by a chow-mix puppy who was found abandoned with a
littermate on March 27.
The resurgence of rabies is likely to derail a campaign led by Frank Perino of East Northport, New York, to start a tourism boycott against Hawaii until it abolishes a 120-day quarantine of all dogs brought to the island from elsewhere. Perino, who is blind, recently canceled a planned vacation to Hawaii because he couldn’t take his guide dog. His effort is supported by Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens/Long Island). ––Merritt Clifton |
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