Attack of the Rabid Squirrel!

I did something really stupid on my vacation last year: I tried to feed a wild animal by hand.

My wife and I were at the Fountain of Youth attraction in Saint Augustine, Florida. The Fountain of Youth has a courtyard with those machines that sell peanuts so you can feed animals, sort of like you’d find at a petting zoo.

The courtyard was filled with preening peacocks that weren’t shy about eating the peanuts from your hand. The squirrels were more bashful, running around trying to pick up nuts that had fallen to the ground.

I found a squirrel braver than the others and I held a peanut out with my fingers to see if he’d eat it out of my hand. I’ll say it right now: I did it just to show off in front of my wife and the other tourists.

The squirrel approached cautiously as I crouched down and tried not to move much so I wouldn’t scare him. Slowly, tentatively, he darted closer and closer…

My index finger stuck out a little bit farther than the peanut I was holding. I guess my fingertip looked like a peanut to the squirrel because he bit it. As soon as he realized it wasn’t edible, he ran off.

It was a gentle bite—it didn’t even break the skin—and I and several tourists who watched laughed it off.

After we got home a few days later, I decided to do a search on the Internet for “rabies” and “squirrels.” Not because I thought I’d be in trouble, but just to satisfy my curiosity.

I was in a hurry so my search was quick and superficial. I learned that squirrels rarely get rabies and also learned that rabies usually incubates in the body for about six weeks when the first signs—flu-like symptoms—appear.

Four weeks after our vacation, my wife, a schoolteacher, went back to work.

A week after that, she got the flu from one of her students.

A week after that—six weeks after our vacation—I started feeling “flu-like symptoms.”

I went to my doctor who seemed more concerned about me getting tetanus from the squirrel bite. I explained that I had been given a tetanus shot about a year before and that the squirrel had never broken my skin.

The doctor gave me a clean bill of health but I wanted a second opinion anyway so I went to the emergency room.

The triage nurse who checked me in didn’t do much to reassure me. A man with an obviously morbid sense of humor, he looked me straight in the eye and told me I’d’ve been dead already if the squirrel had been rabid.

The doctor told me basically the same thing, but in a gentler tone. Although he was young he seemed up to speed on rabies and he told me squirrels rarely get rabies and that in fact the last case of a rabid squirrel in the state of Florida had been reported in the 1960’s.

I thanked him, went home and immediately fired up the computer. I did more research, digging deeper than before and I learned two key—and highly reassuring—facts:

The doctor was right, the last reported case of rabies in a Florida squirrel was in 1961. AND… There have been no, zero, zip, zilch reports of humans getting rabies from squirrels in the United States.

The animals that typically transmit rabies to humans are bats, foxes, and dogs (presumably, dogs that haven’t been vaccinated by their owners against rabies).

By now, ten weeks had passed since our vacation, I was okay, and I could relax. And I learned yet another good reason not to feed wild animals.