Our New Year is off with a wild side

It feels too late to say "Happy New Year", and my New Year has started off as a wild one, literally. Our new cat recently discovered a flying squirrel in the house and had a skirmish with it. Being the animal lover that I am, I separated the two somehow, calmed my hysterical son and got him to bed assuring him that the squirrel was gone. Ha! I checked behind the washer where I had last seen this critter run to, and he was in fact gone. So I decided to watch the cat knowing his radar would be on the animals whereabouts. Sure enough these two bulgy little eyes were peering at me from atop my kitchen drapes. Of course this happened on a night when my husband was out of town, typical, but I figured that I could probably handle it better anyway. I was able to scoop this little creature into a mason jar on the first attempt (because he was behind drapes). I covered the jar with a box top and released the squirrel in my woods. He didn't appear to be hurt, and I felt relieved to have him out of my house. I later felt a sense of doom realizing that maybe I should not have let him go. We've had two incidents with rabid animals in the area in just two years. Those are the ones that we know about. Long story short, because my cat is indoors only and still just a kitten, he had not been vaccinated against the rabies virus. Rabies is highly transmittable through saliva and my cat had this guy in his mouth and played with him a bit as cats will do. After making phone calls to Pediatricians, our family doctor and finally the animal control center, I was told to vaccinate my cat IMMEDIATELY, and, to keep him in quarantine for at least a month. The scary part is that no one could tell me straight up that we were safe from having contracted the virus. My son even got scratched by our cat a day after the incident. So here we are on round two of rabies shots today with 3 more sessions to go. They are nothing like they used to be. The anticipatory anxiety and having to put my son through this was the worst of it all. Just a blink in life time to insure our safety. To add insult to injury, if you have one flying squirrel in your house, you've got the whole family too. We located a nesting spot for them on a top shelf in a built in closet. We are sealing up holes (a total joke in a 1897 house) and trying to find where they are coming in from. Next step is placing baited have a heart traps, and relocating them ten miles away. That's right, the little guy I rescued is probably back in my closet, munching on my cashmere sweaters and defecating at the same time. Yuck!!! Not to mention that they love to chew and can cause an electrical fire. I am over it already. I know some people actually have these as pets. I think I prefer to stick with a good mouser of a house cat. All I can say is that after doing some reading up on the fatal disease called rabies, and seeing some all to graphic images on the internet, that I'm going to cover my ass and get those suckers back in the wild where they belong ASAP!


Would you want this nocturnal guy stalking you in your own home?