03/29/2026
A new excerpt from my upcoming novel, A Company of Paws! This is the final excerpt!
Mad Dog Disease
Spring had begun in earnest as my first year of private practice drew to a close. April came and the earth began to renew itself, with growth appearing everywhere almost at once. Leaves unfurled along formerly bare tree branches that became clothed in green literally overnight, sagging with the collective weight of the new growth. The soil warmed and seeds soaked in the heavy rains, swelling where they lay buried beneath the ground. In no time, green sprouts of fresh vegetation rapidly covered the earth. On farms across the area, horses and cows and goats and sheep and pigs gave birth to offspring. And in the spring, animals were on the move, prowling about, driven by the urge to reproduce. In the wild, deer and foxes, raccoons and skunks, coyotes and even the occasional black bear emerged from their winter dens and sought out food and mates. Dogs and cats roamed near and far across the countryside, compelled by the same instinct to procreate. And all too unavoidably, conflict, disease, and injury were the inevitable companions of this mass movement of animals.
All animals, domestic and wild, compete with one another for the privilege of reproducing. In the process, they fight and wound one another, or they are hit by cars and trucks as they travel far and wide searching for eligible mates. Dr. Hitchcock was a licensed rehabilitator of wild animals, and with the advent of spring, we received a lot of orphaned wildlife: fawns, rabbits, squirrels, and opossum were the most common species. Blood-borne diseases spread rapidly among mobile populations of animals, and in small animal practice, we saw a lot of cases resulting from this migration of animals. One of the most dangerous and deadly of diseases that reared its head, all too often, and one that also threatened humans, was rabies.
Each spring, the county health department sponsored a rabies clinic, where local veterinarians spent the better part of a Saturday conducting mobile clinics throughout the county. Low-cost rabies vaccinations for dogs and cats were offered in an annual campaign to protect pets and simultaneously prevent their humans from becoming sick. Rabies is almost one hundred percent fatal in affected humans once clinical signs develop, and thankfully very few people in the United States acquire this disease. But there are a small number annually who do become affected with rabies and die, and it remains a significant public health concern. The rapid movement of animals that accompanied each spring helped spread this disease, and each year we tested numerous domestic and wild animals to try to identify cases and protect the people involved. Many of the farmers out in the county religiously brought their dogs to the rabies clinics each year for the “mad-dog shots”. There was a tight-knit group of beagle owners out in Red Hill that had packs of forty or more dogs each, and we vaccinated large numbers of these animals every spring.
Early one Saturday morning that April, a woman brought in a small black and white kitten with her two young children. The daughters were four and six, and they were excited about the new kitten that had wandered up the week before. It played and ate and seemed perfectly healthy, and the little girls had had a ball with the young animal. But in the last few days, Mrs. Davis had noticed the kitten was becoming somewhat jittery. Day by day it seemed to grow progressively worse, stumbling about when it walked, its head jerking continuously from side to side and up and down.
Dr. Hitchcock, concerned, shook his head as he watched the animal on the exam table, eyes narrowed suspiciously. It was very tiny, perhaps only six or seven weeks old, with soft black and white hair and long whiskers that now danced about as the kitten’s head twitched back and forth repeatedly. When it tried to take a step, it couldn’t quite decide where to place its feet, and it wobbled and weaved as it tried to half walk/half crawl across the surface of the table.
“When did it begin to act this way?” he asked.
“When she first came up, maybe a week ago, she was fine. She wasn’t jerking at all. For several days, she seemed perfectly normal. But three days ago, this started, and it’s gotten worse. The poor little thing didn’t eat last night or this morning.” She patted her oldest daughter, Sarah, on the head, as she continued.
“Sarah was prying open its mouth, trying to get it to eat a piece of tuna this morning. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
Dr. Hitchcock raised his eyebrows, especially when she said Sarah had been handling its mouth.
“Do you know of any injuries that may have occurred in the last few days? Could it have fallen off anything? Is it possible the girls might have accidentally hurt it while playing?”
Mrs. Davis shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. My husband made it a box on the floor of the garage, and I’ve been with the girls whenever they went outside to play with it.”
“When the kitten first wandered up, did it have any wounds or sores that you noticed anywhere on its body, like maybe a bite wound from another animal?”
She shook her head again. “It was surprisingly clean. If there was anything there, I didn’t notice it. I couldn’t even find any fleas on it.”
“Has it bitten anyone in the family?”
Mrs. Davis shook her head at first, then admitted she didn’t know for sure. “It probably bit the girls’ hands while they played with it. They’ve both had quite a few scratches on their arms.”
Dr. Hitchcock carefully examined the animal. Its oral mucous membranes were pink, but there was a little bit of saliva clinging to its chin where it had been drooling. Its eyes had blobs of dried matter in each corner. When he took the kitten’s temperature, it was normal.
“What do you think is wrong?” the owner asked.
“I don’t want to alarm you, but I think there’s a possibility this kitten is rabid.”
The woman’s eyes grew wide with alarm. “Oh no!” she cried.
She was carrying her youngest daughter on her right hip, and she reflexively pulled her oldest daughter’s hand away from the table where the little girl had been trying to coax the kitten to walk to the end of the table. At the same time, she took a giant step backwards, dragging the young girl along with her to stand pressed against the wall.
“There are other possibilities, of course. The kitten could have a bacterial infection, it could have an inner ear infection, for example, or some sort of other noninfectious neurological disease is possible. There could have been an injury that no one is aware of. But we can’t automatically rule out rabies. We don’t know anything about the history of this animal or where it came from. And both the girls have been playing with the kitten, in close contact, so exposure is a real concern.”
Mrs. Davis nodded her head worriedly. “All of us, the girls, me, my husband, we’ve all been playing with it since it arrived. It was chasing the girls, nibbling on their toes, just the other day. Can we test it for rabies?”
“Unfortunately, the brain has to be tested to confirm rabies, so it’s always a postmortem diagnosis.”
The woman stared uncomprehendingly at Dr. Hitchcock. “Postmortem?”
“It means after death. But rabies can take weeks to months to develop in a human once exposure has occurred, and the virus is only transmitted through bite wounds. The virus is in the animal’s saliva during the ten-day period before death occurs. The saliva has to make contact with an open wound for transmission to occur.”
“Can we vaccinate it?”
“No, if it’s already sick with rabies, a vaccine won’t help. What we have to do is keep this kitten under quarantine for the next ten days. If it dies during the quarantine period, it will have to be submitted to the state for rabies testing. If it survives the ten-day quarantine period, then there is no way it could have transmitted the virus to you or anyone in your family. The rabies virus in only in the saliva in the last ten days before death.”
“What if it does die before the end of quarantine? Does that mean we have rabies? Are my children going to die?” Tears were rapidly forming in her eyes at the thought, the developing hysteria obvious on her face.
“No, no, it doesn’t mean that.” Dr. Hitchcock said hurriedly. “If the kitten dies and tests positive, there is a treatment to prevent rabies in anyone who was exposed. But it sounds like in that case, all of you would have to be treated.”
She calmed down a little at this, but her anxiety level was still very high.
“How do we quarantine it?”
“I want you to leave it here at the clinic with me. We’ll treat for possible infection and keep it safely confined for the next ten days. I have to let the health department know, and they’ll probably be in contact with you. And it’s a good idea to talk to your family physician, so they are in the loop with what’s happening.”
More than a little distraught, Mrs. Davis washed her hands and those of each of her daughters, vigorously rubbing their palms, fingers, and even wrists and forearms with surgical scrub that Dr. Hitchcock offered. Then she left, promising to call her family doctor as soon as she returned home.
Dr. Hitchcock and I were the only two employees at the clinic who’d been vaccinated for rabies, so for the next few days, we handled the kitten exclusively. I made a bed with towels and added a litter box and food and water bowls in a cage in our isolation ward, and we printed a sign for the cage with “CAUTION – DO NOT HANDLE – RABIES QUARANTINE” printed in large bold letters. We posted a similar sign on the window of the door to the room and closed it tightly, adding “DO NOT ENTER” for good measure.
Over the next few days, the kitten worsened rapidly. The head tremors became more pronounced, and in the end, the kitten could hardly stand at all and wouldn’t eat or drink. It stumbled blindly around the cage, a dull blank look in its eyes, streams of saliva hanging from its perpetually open little mouth. Not even three days later, it died, and we called the county health department to arrange to have the animal tested. To test for rabies, brain tissue is required, and the deceased animal’s head must be removed. The test is rapid and usually only takes two to three days to receive results. By the following Thursday after Mrs. Davis had presented the kitten, we were notified by the health department that the kitten had tested positive for rabies. Anyone with known contact was advised to undergo immediate rabies post-exposure treatment. This regimen involved administering hyperimmune serum rich in human antibodies against the rabies virus intramuscularly, in addition to receiving several doses of the rabies vaccine. And it was expensive. At that time, the Davis family spent almost twelve thousand dollars to treat all four. However, no amount of money was more important that their two little girls’ safety, and thankfully, the whole family was fine, much to the parents’ relief.
But that spring, rabies was not finished with us yet. One of my neighbors on Bartson Street, a young couple who lived just down the road from my house, called me one afternoon the following week. The husband had a German Shepherd that he kept in a fenced-in kennel in the yard, and a skunk had dug under the fence that morning and crawled into the enclosure with the dog, who promptly killed it. Rabies is endemic in our area in skunks, foxes, and raccoons. These animals are generally nocturnal, so it is unusual for them to be out around human habitations, especially in the middle of the day. Rabies produces encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, and in their deluded mental state, affected animals often lose their innate fear of people and dogs and will wander up to houses during the day when humans and pets are about. Although not always aggressive, sometimes they will blindly attack.
Because this skunk had come up during the morning on a bright sunny day and purposely dug into a kennel with the large dog, it was most likely rabid. If so, the dog had definitely been exposed, but fortunately he’d been vaccinated for rabies in the last year. Sure enough, a few days later, the skunk tested positive for rabies. Because the dog’s vaccination status was current, the owner was required to keep the animal confined for forty-five days. When properly vaccinated animals are exposed to rabies, the quarantine protocol is not as restrictive, and at the end, we revaccinated the dog to be safe.
My mother also lived on Bartson Street, and in mid-April, she called one day to say that there was a large cat standing at her front door, banging its head senselessly into the outer glass door as she watched safely from inside. She called the police, but when they arrived about thirty minutes later, the “cat” was gone. While they were talking with my mom, the two officers received a call about a man down the street being attacked by a wild animal. He’d gone outside to his car, and some animal had rushed out from underneath the car and bitten him multiple times on the legs as he tried to fight it off. He managed to chase it away, and when the officers hurried off to the new location, the animal had disappeared again. But when the man gave his statement, he described it as a bobcat. The officers were a little incredulous at this, until they received a third report of a cat stalking a couple of children who were out playing in their front yard, again only a short distance down the same street.
Sure enough, the critter in question was a bobcat, with distinctive black-tipped ears. When the policemen arrived at the third house, they scared the animal away from the children and gave chase, tracking it to a local warehouse a few streets over. The abandoned building was no longer in use, and when the beast was safely inside, the officers killed it. Once it was dead, they confirmed that the animal was indeed a very large bobcat, roughly twenty-five pounds. I showed my mother a photo, and she confirmed that it was the “cat” that had been on her porch earlier that morning. Luckily, it hadn’t wandered around to her back door…
Excerpt from A Company of Paws © 2026 Jason K. Macomson All Rights Reserved
Book Cover Design © 2026 Jason K. Macomson All Rights Reserved
Book Cover design created with the use of AI tools.
A Company of Paws is expected to be released this summer. In the meantime, if you haven't read it yet, look for my first novel about veterinary medicine, Red Barn Tales, on Amazon and other online retailers. Red Barn Tales is also available to order at Walmart and Books-a-Million.
