53% of U.S. dog owners hesitant about the rabies vaccine | Hacker News Reader

53% of U.S. dog owners hesitant about the rabies vaccine

npr.org

23 pointsgeox46 comments

I speak from long experience in and around dog rescue. What you have to understand about animal people is that many of them are noble examples of humanity at its finest, and also that many of them use the pets as a weird kind of proxy battlefield for their personal political axe grinds and/or lunacy. The sane ones mostly tolerate this because at the end of the day, at least the animals are (hopefully) benefiting and that's what counts.

My wife was into rabbits for a bit, and we had one woman from a rescue tell us that you can bond two females together. Now at that time, we're completely naive to rabbits and don't know anything about bonding, or flopping, or thumping or whatever words rabbit people say, so we took her at her word. It wasn't until later after my wife took a nasty bite that I had a conversation with another rescue that I figured out this is just some extension of extreme feminist politics that weirdos are trialing live on their unwitting pets. Of course "bonding" means exactly what you'd think it means, and therefore in the real world two female rabbits don't do it. I felt really embarrassed in that moment.

Same thing with people feeding their cats (obligate carnivores) a vegan diet and stuff.

As someone that has always been around cats and dogs a great deal of my life, and reaching 50, I never got that.

For millions of years they did just fine without any kind of gourmet food, or stupid fancy clothes.

To a point, we've also bred at least some them to have some fairly severe health problems, and also raised them in a dramatically different way then they would have evolved with - but of course we also keep them from dying young from disease or starvation.

Wolves and other felines aren't doing that bad, other than survival issues caused by mankind.

> I figured out this is just some extension of extreme feminist politics that weirdos are trialing live on their unwitting pets.

Lots of people bond pairs of females rabbits without any involvement of extreme feminist politics. Rabbits are social creatures that normally live in groups. Many people who have rabbits for pets don't want to host an entire community of bunnies, but also know that a solo bunny is a sad one so owning pairs of rabbits is very common. People may end up with same sex pairs by circumstance or choice (it's one way to help avoid ending up with more than two bunnies).

If all you've got are two girl bunnies, and you can take the time to do it, getting them to be friends can make them both much happier. Especially if they're already kept in close proximity because rabbits (females especially) are territorial and can get stressed if they're always seeing/smelling an "outsider".

Same with many (most?) rodents. Growing up, we raised pairs female guinea pigs and mice. It made a huge difference in the temperance of the guinea pigs from the solo male we had, not sure if this was due more to socialization or gender.

(Ironically, both guinea pigs and mice immediately had litters. We had to have the vet re-confirm their sex, as guinea pigs can be difficult to tell apart. Both were indeed female, they were pregnant from the store... 1 baby guinea pig, 15 baby mice.)

I guess the situation isn't so straightforward after all and people in general assess others' actions as a proxy for their own beliefs just as pet owners might use their pets that way.

> Same thing with people feeding their cats (obligate carnivores) a vegan diet and stuff.

This is just animal abuse.

> My wife was into rabbits for a bit, and we had one woman from a rescue tell us that you can bond two females together. [...] I figured out this is just some extension of extreme feminist politics that weirdos are trialing live on their unwitting pets.

There was a lot of this sort of rhetoric back when gay marriage was on the horizon-- people started looking to the animal kingdom to normalize homosexuality. Gayness is what it is, but nothing these people spontaneously presented aligns with anything I've seen in a lifetime of organic animal ownership.

In my experience, female animals of every kind do not get along in captivity-- they don't become lesbian lovers, they just kill each other (try having two female roommates!). They're crazy aggressive (my female dog becomes a violent rapist of my male when in heat) and in ownership or dogsitting it's only female dogs that have ever bitten through my skin. Of four cats, the three females fight each other constantly, and two of them constantly sneak out to kill rats. In humans, sororities are a discreetly-abusive nightmare, and lesbian domestic violence rates are roughly 2x that of gays (and ~1.5x that of male heterosexuals).

Best keep them separated.

> Cindy Marabito runs a pit bull rescue out of her house in Austin, Texas. "We're the only raw-feeding, holistic, completely no-kill pit bull refuge and rescue in the United States," she says. She currently has nine dogs that roam her big, mulched backyard by the banks of the Colorado River.

> The philosophy of her rescue is to give "low to no vaccines."

This is nuts. So what happens to especially aggressive pit bulls, that also happen to be ill?

This people shouldn't be allowed to run shelters of any kind.

I'm fairly unsurprised to hear this is in Texas.

Same thing as anything else that gets rabies, basically fast zombies that are hard to kill. Truly terrifying.

Raw feeding is so much more expensive and has no scientific advantages for dogs. This sounds par for the course for a terribly managed shelter.

Pit Bulls should be illegal in the first place, and the people who attach themselves to specifically this breed of dog have a form of mental illness, and are allergic to facts and statistics (or rather, base their entire identity around trying to prove those statistics wrong).

rabies is the single deadliest disease known to humankind. as in, if you get it and don't get treated, you WILL die. somebody really needs to show these people old yeller.

3 survivors so far: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/california-girl-us-survive-rab...

For all intents and purposes it’s essentially 100%.

100% death rate ?

Sorry not a native English speaker.

You get rabies, you die. Yes. There is one known survivor /w a very esoteric procedure called the milwaukee protocol but it is not considered defacto. Either you're immunized, or you're practically dead.

The Milwaukee protocol has now failed to replicate successfully so many times it’s been discouraged from future use because with just one exception all it did was prolong the suffering.

How does it prolong the suffering? Do patients under induced coma feel the effects of the terrible symptoms? Or do you mean something else? I was under the impression that the worst effect of the Milwaukee protocol was being unable to wake up from it.

The Milwaukee Protocol may not be all it's cracked up to be[1].

> A total of 29 patients with rabies encephalitis were treated during the described period. Only two patients treated during this period have been reported as survivors. However, in both of these cases the patients failed to develop neutralizing anti-rabies virus antibodies, raising serious doubts about whether these individuals actually had rabies encephalitis.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-...

Those are iffy “it might not have been rabies” cases.

The point is, the rabies makes putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger look safe in comparison.

You know, that is interesting - it was a point of learning that in the 90's/00's but I don't see it really being a book presented today. I wonder how much knowledge society develops, says it's interesting/useful/informative, adapts it and then just forgoes it.

That's what it feels like now, just a circle.

Why, by the way, do nonhumans get vaccinated, but humans don't?

(and particularly considering we're very similar across species in these ways)

This might be oudated, I've heard there is a new vaccine that's easier. But historically, the rabies vaccine has involved multiple very painful injections, and cost thousands of dollars.

can't speak for price but I have been vaccinated for rabies there were 4 or 5 shots over a few weeks none of them were particularly painful.

Humans are much less likely to spread the disease.

It's also a very different situation if you happen to die due to your choices, vs if your dog kills a neighbor's kid.

Some are all in favor of the vaccine, but less fond of having to register each dose given with the county and get a tag and so on.

Of course it's not legal, as a private citizen, to buy a vial of rabies vaccine and distribute it without that tracking. I'm pretty confident that there's more vaccinated animals than the official figures reflect, regardless.

I don't doubt the registration hesitancy, but isn't it ultimately in pet owners' interest to have a record of their pets' rabies vaccines?

> Not vaccinating against rabies could lead to your dog dying if they get infected – or in some cases – if they bite someone, Teller from Texas A&M says: "There is a real likelihood that animal control could euthanize your dog and test it for rabies because human health is going to supersede animal health at that point," she says.

IIRC rabies testing in animals requires a necropsy... so if your dog bites someone and there's no proof that you vaccinated them, they might get put down and their brain dissected.

There is one thing that is bullshit about the rabies vaccine/license set up and its that the shots are good for 3 years, but some places require that the shots be given every year.

Some vets will even give pet owners the choice between a "3 year shot" or a "one year shot". These are both identical. Same doses. Same drug. The "every year" shot just takes more of your money.

If you live somewhere that demands annual rabies vaccines you should try to get that changed or try to move somewhere more reasonable. If you have the option to get one shot every three years do it and save your money and spare your pet the unnecessary puncture wounds. In any case this is no excuse for not getting the vaccine at all

When I asked my vet about the efficacy of Lyme disease vaccine (which I'd read was mostly pointless, more risky, and not-long-lasting) I felt like a total anti-vaxxer.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

He wasn't the greatest vet, but I don't think he'd ever even considered the possibility that a vaccine wasn't simply the best (only) option.

Not an anti-vaxxer, but with the world of knowledge at our fingertips, we shouldn't necessarily hate people for wanting to "do their own research", despite how poorly they do it.

Have them read Cujo and watch the number hit 100% again

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