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March/April 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Raccoons Curious by nature

"We studied the ecology of raccoons," explains Rosatte, who took charge of the Prescott operation. "A normal raccoon will spend most of its time during a day or two days within a four-square-kilometre area. Most of them don’t travel more than five kilometres within a couple of weeks. We also know how rabies works: this rabid raccoon was probably clinical - or acting rabid — for less than a week. But it had the potential during this time to affect many other raccoons and foxes and skunks in the area. So we said to ourselves, okay, if we draw a five-kilometre radial arc around where the raccoon was found, we should be encompassing the area that it travelled during those few days, and we should be catching the animals that are incubating rabies from this animal."

The plan, then, called for euthanizing animals within a 75-square-kilometre area. Rosatte divided this circular zone into eight trapping cells, each of which was roughly 10 square kilometres, and assigned each a trapper with 100 traps. Outside this perimeter, a secondary zone was established within which raccoons, skunks and foxes would be captured, vaccinated and then released.

The trappers succeeded in removing most of the area’s raccoons and skunks during the first few days of the operation. "If you want to catch a raccoon," says Chambers, who was assigned to the inner zone, "you have to think like a raccoon. Raccoons like to stay down low out of sight. They’ll travel in ditches whenever they can, hunting frogs. If they have to cross a road, they’ll go through a culvert rather than out in the open. Also, they can’t resist sardines."

The landscape around Prescott is a patchwork of cedar shrub, farm fields and housing. Before setting a trap, the trappers had to seek permission from the landowners. Another complication was the drought that had recently beset the region, drying up streams and ditches where raccoons were most often to be found. Working independently of one another, each trapper targeted the most obvious places first: culverts and ditches still holding water, and streambeds on the fringes of cornfields and forests.

"Raccoons travel at the edge of things," says Chambers, a kindly, bearded man with a tendency to stop his truck in the middle of the road to pick up and relocate drought-stricken turtles. "You won’t find them in the middle of a forest or the middle of a field. You’ll find them where the forest and the field come together. Same with water; they’ll walk along the shallows, partly in the water and partly on the land, feeling for food." Chambers says an experienced trapper can identify which trails through tall grass belong to which animals. "Raccoons are low to the ground so the grass closes over the top and makes a tunnel. If the tunnel is too small, it’s made by a rabbit; if it’s not there at all, it’s likely a deer. But if it’s raccoon-sized, that is a good place to drop a few sardines and set your trap."

While Chambers and the other trappers scouted fields and streams, Rosatte and his support team assembled a field laboratory in a vacant MNR building in nearby Limerick Forest. Boxes of syringes, vials and rubber gloves — as well as several chest-style freezers to store hundreds of dead raccoons prior to incineration — replaced the fishing nets and tree-planting equipment normally kept on site.

Each day, the trappers assigned to the inner zone would bring in the animals they had trapped, which were then euthanized by injection. Then, a brain sample was extracted, frozen and sent out to the CFIA lab near Ottawa. Every second day, the accumulation of frozen raccoons was dispatched by truck to Kemptville, 35 kilometres away, where they were incinerated at an agricultural college. "The whole operation was planned ahead of time," says Rosatte, "and it went like clockwork."

Almost. Just as the team was winding up the operation after two straight weeks of 18-hour days, a second case of raccoon rabies was reported in Jellyby, 15 kilometres west of the original site, and another round of trapping began. From the combined areas of nearly 600 square kilometres, a total of 872 raccoons and 209 skunks were euthanized, and 571 cats were vaccinated and released. Some 50,000 baits were also dropped around the two containment zones.

Then, on September 17, a third case was discovered just south of the nearby town of Oxford Station. By this time, Chambers and the contingent of trappers from the Niagara Region had been sent home to continue efforts to prevent a breakout there. Area trappers took up the work along the St. Lawrence. An exhausted Rosatte anticipated that any further advance would be checked with the onset of colder weather. "Raccoons become inactive by late October," explained MacInnes. "Basically, they go into their dens and don’t come out much until mating season."

This fall was different. By the end of January, there were 14 confirmed cases of raccoon rabies in eastern Ontario. "They were probably infected right around the onset of the program," says MacInnes, "and incubated the virus until the disease forced them out of dormancy. It proves that if we hadn’t taken the steps we did, we’d be much worse off. There are a lot of factors to consider in deciding where and when to bait, economics being one. Baiting isn’t a magic wand you wave over the countryside and poof, rabies is gone. We’ll probably do treat-vaccinate-release as early as we can but as for baiting, we know from experience that baiting in early spring doesn’t work very well. It may not be feasible to bait again until June or July. We’re certainly going to be watching things very closely."

With the emergence of new raccoon rabies cases, there is growing concern that the war on the virus may become a long and costly one.

Like other levels of government, MNR is in a period of budgetary restraint. A single 14-day point infection program costs about $110,000. "Fifteen trappers," says Rosatte, "working 18 hours a day at $16 an hour, plus meals and accommodation, runs nearly $5,000 a day." Add to that salaries for eight support staff, vehicle leases and gas, and charges for equipment and incineration. Excluded from the tally are the cage traps, which had already been purchased. "Those cost $60 each and we sent out 3,000 of them."

MNR’s budget for raccoon rabies control had been just under half a million dollars a year. Last summer’s outbreaks have severely strained resources. Rosatte, though, is philosophical about relative costs. "Right now in Ontario," he says, "we’re spending about $6 million a year on fox rabies-related activities [post-exposure treatment, investigations into biting incidents, laboratory costs, and ongoing public education]. Every year in the U.S., about 20,000 people receive post-exposure treatment, which costs at least $1,000 per person. That’s $20 million eaten up right there."

If Ontario gets a full-blown outbreak of raccoon rabies, Rosatte estimates that the cost to the province, based on what is happening in the U.S., will increase to about $20 million a year. "So we have to start asking ourselves, can we afford $1 million for a baiting program to prevent an epidemic that would cost $20 million a year if it establishes itself? It’s a numbers game."

As for Jeffrey Vail — whose kennel became the site of Canada’s first recorded case of raccoon rabies — he’s decided for the time being not to get another dog. "They’re just too hard to replace," he says. "But if I ever do, you can be damn sure I’ll have it vaccinated."

Scott Gardiner is a Toronto writer.

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