I’m a rural westerner. That means that I have a nodding acquaintance with rabies, hantavirus, and plague. Plague – Black Death – is endemic among western ground squirrels. It’s not an easy disease to catch from them – Yersina pestis can be passed on through fleas or direct contact with infected individuals, but it doesn’t take a lot of caution to avoid. Still, every year we tend to see a report of a death or too from plague.
The control of rabies began with Pasteur’s research and vaccines. I recall spotting a skunk that was behaving as if it were rabid (in South Dakota). I took a box of 22 shells, jacked the sights as high as they would go, and, after about a dozen rounds, started producing hits. I doubt if I ever got closer than 200 yards, and I just left the beast in the middle of the pasture. Raccoons, skunks, and bats are the common vectors – we have vaccines for our dogs and cats, so it too is a disease that we need only common caution around.
Hantavirus was something I learned of as an adult in the southwest. It’s carried by the deer mouse – not the house mouse.
I had a rodent nest in the air cleaner of my Eagle Talon a couple of years back – it is hard to describe the relief I felt as I was cleaning it out and found a recognizable shrew skull. The problem with hantavirus is that it is deposited in urine or saliva of the deer mouse, and then, as in the nest I referred to, becomes airborne and you breath it in. In most cases it’s relatively easy to avoid – but its presence makes me appreciate the house mouse and the packrat for neighbors. The deer mouse has a white underbelly, while the house mouse is uniform in its coloration. Both will move into your house, and the deer mouse is a lot more common in rural areas.
So if you’re rural, and wind up with a two-tone mouse with a bald tail in the house, set up about a dozen mouse traps, baited with peanut butter. A dozen traps for one mouse isn’t overkill when it comes to keeping hantavirus out of your home.
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