Rabies control requires both wisdom and compassion

By Ye Li-sen, Adjunct Professor, National Taiwan University College of Veterinary Medicine

Taiwan's rabies outbreak shows no sign of abating. From the adorable ferret badger and the money rat that brings fortune, to dogs and cats, almost every living creature is exposed to the ravages of the virus. And the people of Taiwan, as is their habit, out of lack of knowledge, out of frivolity and lack of self-restraint, and all the more because the media fan the flames, look set to go rabid along with them.

When the people of Taiwan go mad, that is when the animals truly face an inescapable catastrophe.

We can no longer bear to ask when the virus entered Taiwan. Nor need we investigate why the dog registration rate is so low, and why Taiwan, which should administer more than 1.5 million doses of vaccine each year for disease prevention, cannot today even come up with three to five hundred thousand doses. What is past is past; these mistakes have already been made, and blame is meaningless. But disease control is like warfare, and regarding the authorities' current disease control strategy, we cannot forget our responsibility as citizens, and must speak out without reserve.

The Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine has many disease control experts, but when experts set out strategies in fields they are not familiar with, they too can make mistakes; experts need humility. More than twenty days have passed since the rabies outbreak erupted in June. From the very beginning we knew how thorny and unpredictable it is when an outbreak broadly enters wildlife populations. Yet the government has been unable to produce effective, complete, comprehensive measures and a timetable; all the disease control strategies, simply put, amount to nothing more than constantly telling everyone where has fallen next, and telling dogs and cats to go get the vaccine that cannot be found.

More than twenty days have passed, and the laboratory still has only a handful of staff to handle the overwhelming flood of specimens, while frontline disease control personnel still do not have enough preventive shots to protect their own safety. Some places have gone mad catching dogs everywhere; dog catchers have no day or night, no rest, and the dogs caught and the animals abandoned by the public have nowhere to stay and no one to feed them. Where should animals needing isolation and observation be kept, how should it be done, should they be vaccinated, should they be killed? None of it is clear. Some local disease control units have no veterinarian assigned at all, and no standard operating procedure (SOP) to follow, so that some animals are killed as soon as they are caught! Everyone is jittery, and because of the lack of information, nothing can be explained clearly, and everyone lives in a fear of their own weaving.

Most terrifying of all, the disease control units have never wanted to actively fill the biggest current gap in disease control: wildlife and stray dogs and cats that cannot be reached by people. Many cats and dogs in the mountains cannot be caught, and for the first time this has made both dog lovers and dog haters nervous. Oral vaccines have precedents of successful use in many countries, yet from the very beginning they were never considered; now that the outbreak has spread further and public sentiment is seething, only then is there leisurely preparation to hold an international symposium to 'look into it.' Doing nothing about wildlife and the abandoned animals in the mountains is like letting a wildfire burn through the entire forest day by day, and in these mountain forests lies our precious biodiversity!

Because of the characteristics of Taiwanese society, and the lack of wisdom and efficiency of the competent authorities, the rabies incident seems destined to end in tragedy. Who knows how many innocent animals will ultimately lose their lives? With calamity imminent, we beseech the esteemed officials of the competent authorities in our grief: if the train of slaughter is destined not to stop, could you at least prepare enough euthanasia drugs in time, and use methods that are not too brutal, to give them a quick and merciful end!

But I still hold a faint hope: as the animals around us fall one by one to this ancient virus, even though our reason-blind society respects only humans, everyone has by now come to understand that human beings in fact have no ability to slaughter every living creature around them. We must clearly recognize that for humans, rabies is not as terrifying as imagined. It does not spread through the air and contact like avian flu or enterovirus, and the public can completely avoid and prevent the danger themselves. The unlucky ones have always been only the animals. From another perspective, what rabies teaches us is that we must learn to become more responsible owners, to care more about our environment, to respect wildlife more, and to always keep a polite distance from them. Through this opportunity, we must reshape our relationship with nature.

Vaccinating and euthanizing stray cats and dogs will not help eradicate rabies

For more rabies information, please click here