It seems that six hours up the road in Milton, West Virginia, the raccoons are not rabid, but drunk.
Right. Why should they be different than the rest of the town?
Rabid animals are, of course, no laughing matter. The rabies virus can infect the central nervous system, resulting in disease and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that happens after a host of increasingly scary symptoms: partial paralysis, agitation, hallucinations, hydrophobia. A British man and two children died in Morocco after they were bitten by a rabid cat.
So it was not surprising that when people in the city of Milton in the US state of West Virginia, saw raccoons behaving weirdly, they involved the local police.
Officers staked out the area where the suspect animals were hanging out, looking for any signs of the masked perpetrators.
But when they caught two of them, they realized they were dealing with a different kind of issue.
The raccoons, apparently, had been feasting on crab apples that had fermented on the tree, causing the small animals to walk around "staggering and disoriented," police said.
"Turns out they appear to be drunk on crab apples," police said in their official statement to the community.
The apprehended animals were held in custody and allowed to sober up in what can only be deemed a raccoon drunk tank.
Then they were released into the wild, but not before some enterprising officer took a picture of the animal, showing it to be dazed, woozy, more than a little out of it. They named one drunk raccoon Dallas and released both near the woods.
I've never seen a drunk animal other than I dog I knew some 40 years ago who liked to drink beer, and I was never sure he was actually drunk because there was so much pot in the air that he might have been stoned. But I digress.
Reports of drunken waxwings are a common feature this time of year, and then there were the alcoholic binge-drinking elephants of Assam in India. There was the bear that snorted his weight in cocaine (or tried to). But raccoons drunk off crab apples? I guess. Why not? Moose getting blotto from apples and crab apples seems to be a thing in Alaska, Sweden and Norway. Why not West Virginia?
2 comments:
Where I grew up in California, we had annual episodes of Robin's, drunk on pyracantha (sp?) berries, crashing into windows. In some areas, where dividing strips were planted in pyracantha, drunk birds were also a road hazard.
my sheep sometimes get drunk in the Fall when they eat the windfall apples that have started to ferment, and which i have been tardy in picking up...they basically act like drunk humans.
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