Speaker 1: Here's the story about rabies in three sentences. You get
Speaker 1: bitten by a rabbit animal, you lose control of your mind,
Speaker 1: and then you die. So it is not surprising that
Speaker 1: Raby's terrified humanity for thousands of years. Why do you
Speaker 1: write a book about Raby's, gosh?
Speaker 2: I have always thought Rabi's was so interesting in terms
Speaker 2: of its biology, the way it hijacks the brain to
Speaker 2: ensure that it'll continue its own spread, the way it
Speaker 2: affects the relationship between people and animals, which, since I'm
Speaker 2: a veterinarian, is pretty central to my life.
Speaker 1: Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and the co author with
Speaker 1: Bill Wasick of Rabbit, a Cultural History of the world's
Speaker 1: most diabolical virus. I should mention that Monica also happens
Speaker 1: to be my neighbor and a friend of mine.
Speaker 2: I think the stories that my rabbit Google alert turns
Speaker 2: up every week, you know, Bobcat's like coming into a
Speaker 2: bar and like assaulting someone at a pool table, or
Speaker 2: raccoons attacking people's trucks. All that stuff is just really
Speaker 2: interesting and scary and the stuff of nightmares. But I
Speaker 2: love that science has an answer for all of that
Speaker 2: in the.
Speaker 1: Developed world, almost nobody gets rabies anymore. In the United States,
Speaker 1: it's fewer than ten people a year. Even our dogs
Speaker 1: are safe from the disease for the most part. And
Speaker 1: the reason for this, the reason we don't have to
Speaker 1: worry that every barking dog we see might bite us
Speaker 1: and kill us, goes back to one of the most
Speaker 1: important scientists in the history of both viruses and vaccines,
Speaker 1: Louis Pasteur. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is Incubation, a
Speaker 1: show about viruses. We're delighted to be launching season two today.
Speaker 1: We have lots more viruses to talk about this season,
Speaker 1: and we're starting with rabies. In the first half of
Speaker 1: the show, we'll be talking to Monica about rabies and
Speaker 1: the work of Louis Pasteur. Second after the show, we'll
Speaker 1: talk to a scientist who's fighting rabies in wildlife in
Speaker 1: a really surprising way. So let's talk about rabies. What
Speaker 1: is rabies?
Speaker 2: So rabies is an RNA virus. It is special because
Speaker 2: it is transmitted through bites, primarily unlike the sort of
Speaker 2: transmission pattern we see with other viruses. In rabies, at
Speaker 2: the site of the bite, the virus is looking to
Speaker 2: interact with a nerve, and once it has engaged the nerve,
Speaker 2: it kind of ratchets its way up the central nervous
Speaker 2: system from the bite site through peripheral nerves up into
Speaker 2: the spine, and from the spine up into the brain.
Speaker 2: It takes a while. It's a slow, slow process.
Speaker 1: It's like a centimeter a day or There is a.
Speaker 2: Real sort of relationship between how far away the is
Speaker 2: from the brain and how long it takes to develop rabies,
Speaker 2: although it's not strict, and it does mean that if
Speaker 2: you're bitten on the face, you are likely to come
Speaker 2: down with rabies faster than if you're bitten on the toe,
Speaker 2: and not every bite from a rabbit animal will result
Speaker 2: in transmission something like twenty percent to your round number.
Speaker 2: And once the virus does make it into the brain,
Speaker 2: you're going to develop symptoms of rabies. They're horrible, and
Speaker 2: then you're going to die. It's practically speaking, one hundred
Speaker 2: percent fatal, like wo really rotten. And the way it works, too,
Speaker 2: which is pretty horrifying if you think about it, is
Speaker 2: it's hijacking the brain to ensure that it's going to
Speaker 2: be spread to another individual.
Speaker 1: And you say, what do you mean so in especially in.
Speaker 2: The species it's adapted to, let's say, dog rabies. In
Speaker 2: the dog, it is going to stimulate parts of the
Speaker 2: brain that kind of rev up that dog's sort of
Speaker 2: social emotional state, make it much more prone to violence
Speaker 2: and biting incidents with other dogs. So that meanwhile it's
Speaker 2: being secreted in the saliva. It's really increasing the likelihood
Speaker 2: that it's going to make it into another dog and
Speaker 2: continuous life cycle, which is.
Speaker 1: Kind of amazing, right, Like it's just a virus, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's essentially evolved to like change the behavior of
Speaker 1: this complex mammal to make it bite other mammals so
Speaker 1: that the virus will spread. Like that is a wild
Speaker 1: feet of evolution.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's really really scary. In places where humans
Speaker 2: are frequently in contact with rabbit animals, the sort of
Speaker 2: behavioral changes that occur in the human Rebe's victim are
Speaker 2: also really messy. You know, a human with Rabe's might
Speaker 2: not actively try to bite you, unless they're a little kid.
Speaker 2: They might punch you in the nose or just scream
Speaker 2: curses at you.
Speaker 1: In general, people become more hostile.
Speaker 2: More violent, yeah, or sext up uh huh.
Speaker 1: So just like more id. Yeah, terrifying. You're being attacked
Speaker 1: by your own brain, right, somehow, You're like your own
Speaker 1: thoughts are attacking you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean so you talk with respect to that
Speaker 1: in the book about kind of rabies and mythology, right,
Speaker 1: rabies and were wolves, rabies and vampires, Like, tell me
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 2: There's at least a deep resonance between these stories of
Speaker 2: a sort of contagious you know, contagious zombieism or werewolf
Speaker 2: ism or vampirism where the bite the bite. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: there's the association with bats and vampires and.
Speaker 1: Both and both bats and wolves are historical vectors of rabies,
Speaker 1: just to be clear. So this is kind of rabies.
Speaker 1: It's this ancient disease. It is terrifying where crazed animals
Speaker 1: bite people and turn people into crazed animals who then die.
Speaker 1: It's basically the state of play rabis forever. And then
Speaker 1: onto the stage of history walks our hero, Louis Pasteur.
Speaker 1: That's right, tell me about Pasteur.
Speaker 2: Most folks know at least a little bit about Louis
Speaker 2: Pastor because he had a long scientific career. He was
Speaker 2: trained as a physicist and chemist, and he grew into
Speaker 2: more of a microbiological concentration in his work. Along the way,
Speaker 2: he established germ theory.
Speaker 1: Yes, that people thought was like a crazy idea, And
Speaker 1: this is like a mid to late eighteen hundreds, right,
Speaker 1: and the world already had the smallpox vaccine at this point.
Speaker 1: But I do feel like it's worth remembering here that
Speaker 1: that was sort of this lucky break, right, where like
Speaker 1: there just happened to be this mild disease, cowpox, that
Speaker 1: made people immune to this terrible disease, to smallpox. And Pasteur,
Speaker 1: as you write in the book, he decides that he's
Speaker 1: going to apply this germ theory to vaccines. Right, He's
Speaker 1: actually going to use science to create a vaccine, So
Speaker 1: tell us about that.
Speaker 2: What Louis Prestor sought to do and succeeded in doing
Speaker 2: for the first time ever is manipulating microbes to sort
Speaker 2: of move them away from their wild state into an
Speaker 2: attenuated a week in state and induce immunity using.
Speaker 1: Those right, So okay, So Pasteur he develops a few
Speaker 1: animal vaccines in this way, and then he decides that
Speaker 1: the first human vaccine he's going to make is going
Speaker 1: to be a rabies vaccine, you know, a vaccine for
Speaker 1: this terrifying disease. So what does he actually have to do?
Speaker 2: So, because there's no way to grow rabies inside of
Speaker 2: a test tube, he had to maintain a population of
Speaker 2: rabbit animals in his lab.
Speaker 1: Terrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah awful, I mean really gruesome and scary for the
Speaker 2: people he worked with. They would harvest the saliva and
Speaker 2: introduce it into more dogs or into rabbits.
Speaker 1: How do you harvest the saliva from a rabid dog
Speaker 1: really carefully? Right, I walked into that.
Speaker 2: But yeah, involving like a high pet Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the mouth of a rabbit dog. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna die. Yeah, I'm afraid. So so you've got
Speaker 1: step one, find the nasty disease. Step two, seemingly the
Speaker 1: harder part, turn that nasty disease into a thing that
Speaker 1: will induce some immunity without causing disease.
Speaker 2: Right, they can't see the microbe. They know it's in
Speaker 2: the nervous tissue, So they start dissecting out nervous tissue
Speaker 2: from animals with rabies, specifically rabbits, and they aged it.
Speaker 2: They age the tissue in a sort of desiccating tray.
Speaker 2: And determined that with sufficient aging, it weakens it.
Speaker 1: Just leave it sitting on the shell for a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, except they ultimately arrived at a method that was
Speaker 2: a lot more complex. They had a sort of well
Speaker 2: whole sort of assembly line of tissues at various stages
Speaker 2: of aging. So you know, you've got your your rabbit
Speaker 2: spinal quarter over here that's aged fourteen days, and here's
Speaker 2: a thirteen day one, and okay, et cetera. The ones
Speaker 2: that are oldest are least virulent. The ones that are
Speaker 2: newest are most virulent and too dangerous to put right
Speaker 2: into a person right out of the gate. So they
Speaker 2: start with an injection of the longest aged nervous tissue,
Speaker 2: the weakest the weakest one, and then over they think
Speaker 2: of a ten days the initial protocol. They inject thirteen
Speaker 2: injections with progressively stronger that is, newer tissue.
Speaker 1: And so is the basic idea, like the weakest one
Speaker 1: induces some immune response so that you can then tolerate
Speaker 1: a slightly stronger one, and you're kind of going up
Speaker 1: a staircase of immunity.
Speaker 2: That's how he developed it, And of course today we
Speaker 2: just have a single strength. Rayby's vaccine in use. So
Speaker 2: his method wasn't the only way to induce immunity, but
Speaker 2: it's you know, they were dealing with a one hundred
Speaker 2: percent fatal disease, I think understandably nervous about introducing it
Speaker 2: into people. And they realized both that they can They
Speaker 2: can do pre exposure vaccination so that the dog can't
Speaker 2: get infected with Rabi's. Uh huh, hold that thought. That's
Speaker 2: not put into use right away. But then they also
Speaker 2: can start a series of vaccine after the dog has
Speaker 2: been exposed to Raby's and prevent him from coming down
Speaker 2: with the disease.
Speaker 1: So they figure this out, and then we have this
Speaker 1: moment when it's time to try it on a person
Speaker 1: for the first time. What is that moment?
Speaker 2: So a case was brought to Louis Pester's attention that
Speaker 2: seemed sufficiently concerning to take a chance on this vaccine
Speaker 2: and involved a young boy who was bitten by the
Speaker 2: grocer's dog who had had undergone a suspicious behavior change
Speaker 2: and was marauding the neighborhood. The bites were extensive, and
Speaker 2: so that's another potential risk factor for development of Rabi's.
Speaker 2: We talked about, meaning he got lots of places, you know,
Speaker 2: lots of places really deeply, so, lots of places where
Speaker 2: the virus could have encountered a nerve, making it likely
Speaker 2: that he was going to come down with rabies at
Speaker 2: some point. They were very pessimistic about the boy's chances,
Speaker 2: and so they sent him to Paris, to.
Speaker 1: Louis Pestor's lab, where he had this vaccine that he
Speaker 1: had not yet tested on a human being.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he had been thinking about testing it on himself.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, a kind of tradition in science.
Speaker 2: Yes, But before he had a chance to test on himself,
Speaker 2: he was persuaded by the physicians caring for this boy
Speaker 2: that this kid might very likely to die if he
Speaker 2: doesn't get the vaccine, and so Pastor went ahead with
Speaker 2: his process.
Speaker 1: So the boy gets this experimental vaccine, and now Pastor
Speaker 1: has to just wait right wait to see what happened.
Speaker 1: So what's going on with Pastor while he's, you know,
Speaker 1: waiting to see whether the boy survives.
Speaker 2: Well, Pastor was sleepless. He was just in a state
Speaker 2: of agonized waiting and was having health problems related to that.
Speaker 2: He traveled a little bit for his health. Well, he
Speaker 2: sort of ticked down the days.
Speaker 1: What happens with the boy?
Speaker 2: The boy does great. He remains healthy during the ten
Speaker 2: day process where he could see inoculations, and once a
Speaker 2: few months had passed, at the point at which you know,
Speaker 2: I was believed he would have come down with rabies
Speaker 2: by now, if not because of the because of the bytes,
Speaker 2: perhaps because the vaccine was dangerous, he continued to thrive.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the vaccine works. What like, how does it play?
Speaker 2: People were excited around the world. I mean, the vanquishing
Speaker 2: of rabies was big news, just as Pistar had calculated,
Speaker 2: not immediately embraced by everyone. There were physicians everywhere who
Speaker 2: had been following the science and sort of got it
Speaker 2: and were eager to put it to use.
Speaker 1: And in the in the sort of long run, in
Speaker 1: the you know, one hundred year arc. What what does
Speaker 1: pastors work mean? Both for rabies and for you know,
Speaker 1: disease research and treatment more.
Speaker 2: Generally, His lab is often credited with developing the science
Speaker 2: of immunology and furthermore lead the foundations just with the
Speaker 2: basic idea that like, you can take infectious agents and
Speaker 2: you can figure out a way to make them weaker.
Speaker 2: That is the basis on which all modern vaccine science works.
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk about rabies today. What is the
Speaker 1: status of rabi's today.
Speaker 2: So rabies is still a problem in many parts of
Speaker 2: the world who have not yet eliminated dog rabies. But
Speaker 2: we're really lucky here that the use of the pre
Speaker 2: exposure vaccine and dogs eliminated dog rabies. We no longer
Speaker 2: have to like look as scance at our pet dogs
Speaker 2: and worry that contact with them could kill us. The
Speaker 2: parts of the world where that is not true, where
Speaker 2: dog brabies is still endemic, places like India and parts
Speaker 2: of Africa, there are still a lot of human rabies deaths.
Speaker 2: I think the who uses the number sixty thousand rabies
Speaker 2: deaths are still happening every year around the world. That
Speaker 2: numbers is really contested. It's been a real challenge getting
Speaker 2: the vaccines and the other products that fight brabies to
Speaker 2: the people who need them most. But those products are
Speaker 2: prohibitively expensive. So rabies is considered a neglected disease by
Speaker 2: the international health authorities, but people are still dying of rabies.
Speaker 2: And then in parts of the world like Europe and
Speaker 2: the United States where dog rabies is not the issue,
Speaker 2: we do still have wildlife rabies, So.
Speaker 1: Like in the US, what wild animals have rabies?
Speaker 2: There's rabies adapted to foxes, skunks, raccoons, and a whole
Speaker 2: lot of bats in the United States.
Speaker 1: Right, I read that, like, if you wake up and
Speaker 1: there's a bat in your room, you should probably get
Speaker 1: a rabies shot because bats can bite you and you
Speaker 1: don't even know us.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's an argument for getting Raby's vaccine if you
Speaker 2: wake up in a room with a bat, although you
Speaker 2: know you should consult your local health guard.
Speaker 1: Did writing the book change the way you think about
Speaker 1: the relationship between humans and animals?
Speaker 2: I do think that there is a way in which
Speaker 2: our relationship with dogs and cats, especially, you know, the
Speaker 2: sort of pure sweetness of it that a lot of
Speaker 2: us experience now, like it had a darker side in
Speaker 2: the pre vaccine era.
Speaker 1: Your dog could turn into a monster and kill you
Speaker 1: or your child. Yes, that was like a real thing
Speaker 1: that could definitely have It was a.
Speaker 2: Real thing, and that was that made it really hard
Speaker 2: to like love and baby our dogs in quite the
Speaker 2: same way as we do today.
Speaker 1: So like this modern phenomenon of the dog being to
Speaker 1: what is arguably a weird extent a part of the family,
Speaker 1: and I include my own family as you know, in
Speaker 1: that that like, you couldn't really have that without pasteur
Speaker 1: without the rabies vaccine.
Speaker 2: It certainly doesn't reach its sort of completion without that.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's wonderful for those of us who love dogs.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Monica. That was delightful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Monica Murphy is the co author with Bill Wassick, of Rabbit,
Speaker 1: a Cultural History of the world's most diabolical virus. Their
Speaker 1: most recent book is Our Kindred Creatures, How Americans came
Speaker 1: to feel the way they do about animals. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in a minute to talk about the surprising way
Speaker 1: that wildlife bilegious are fighting rabies in America right now.
Speaker 1: By the early part of the twenty first century, the
Speaker 1: rabies vaccine had almost entirely eliminated rabies from people and
Speaker 1: dogs in the United States, but the disease has persisted
Speaker 1: in wild animals. I talked about this with Kathy Nelson
Speaker 1: years ago.
Speaker 3: When I was in Vermont. We used to operate a
Speaker 3: rabies hotline in the state. It would get calls in
Speaker 3: from the public and we would sometimes go out to
Speaker 3: investigate them, and we had a skunk that was trying
Speaker 3: to bite the gas cap off of a lawnmower, and
Speaker 3: they'll just bite anything that's in sight, because that's one
Speaker 3: of the fascinating parts about the virus is that it's
Speaker 3: designed to tell the brain to bite things.
Speaker 1: Kathy is the wildlife biologist and the operations supervisor for
Speaker 1: the National Rabies Management Program with the US Department of Agriculture.
Speaker 1: For the past twenty six years, she's been part of
Speaker 1: a federal program that has been fighting rabies in a
Speaker 1: way that that I have to say, I found delightful.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the first time you went up
Speaker 1: in the air, too, fleeing rabies vaccines at the ground.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I still remember. It was so exciting. You you know,
Speaker 3: you help load all these baits onto a plane. You
Speaker 3: walk up the little steps of the small plane, you
Speaker 3: get in it, someone closes the hatch on you. You know,
Speaker 3: the engines start, you take off. You're flying over beautiful
Speaker 3: terrain and landscape, just beautiful agricultural forested land, and you know,
Speaker 3: the person up front says, okay, machine on and you know,
Speaker 3: baits are going down this little belt and I'm just
Speaker 3: moving them around looking out the window, seeing moose, deer,
Speaker 3: you know, all kinds of wildlife. I could literally could
Speaker 3: not believe that I was getting paid to do a
Speaker 3: job like this.
Speaker 1: What kind of plans were you going up?
Speaker 3: Then they have a single wing, two engines.
Speaker 1: How many seats? It's like, how small is it?
Speaker 3: If there were seats in them, there probably would be.
Speaker 3: There would probably be about a dozen seats.
Speaker 1: You're basically fly that cargo van. Yeah, so these baits
Speaker 1: are falling from the sky. Maybe this is a dumb question,
Speaker 1: but like, is there ever any word they're going to
Speaker 1: hit somebody on the head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, not a dumb question at all. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: the navigator in the front seat, not the pilot, but
Speaker 3: the other person who is a USDA wild Life Services employee.
Speaker 3: They have an on off switch, So anytime we're approaching
Speaker 3: a house or a road or a major body of water,
Speaker 3: that switch goes off so that baits aren't distributed. You know,
Speaker 3: over the course of a twenty five year program, we've
Speaker 3: hit a roof for two. But fortunately, you know, once
Speaker 3: folks learn about our program, they're generally really really accepting
Speaker 3: of it, and you know, they're not too mad.
Speaker 1: Is it happening like literally today is it happening this,
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking in August of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Is there a plane in the air today?
Speaker 3: There is? Literally I got a text this morning saying
Speaker 3: all five aircraft are taxing for run ups and take
Speaker 3: off in Watertown. That's Watertown, New York.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the baits, like, what's one of them
Speaker 1: look like? Taste like?
Speaker 3: So we use different vaccine types. One of them looks
Speaker 3: like kind of like a little ketchup packet with a
Speaker 3: slight oil on the outside and attached to that oil
Speaker 3: or tiny little fish.
Speaker 1: Mail crumbs fishmeal sounds delicious to a raccoon, I'm sure, yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3: So the other company they make a sweet bait, and
Speaker 3: it's a sugary, sweet, like marshmallow kind of sweet vanilla
Speaker 3: based bait.
Speaker 1: Presumably you can't just like fling these things out of
Speaker 1: an airplane over a city, right, So how do you
Speaker 1: do it? In you know, urban areas.
Speaker 3: Primarily we drive around in trucks. You know, someone's driving
Speaker 3: another person has the window down in the passenger seat.
Speaker 3: They're tossing a couple baits down. We record the location
Speaker 3: of all of these baits with a GPS unit, so
Speaker 3: that we know where we've baited. Our biggest struggle right
Speaker 3: now is because there's so many other food sources, you know,
Speaker 3: trying to pull them away from a dumpster full of
Speaker 3: pizza to eat one of our baits is a real challenge.
Speaker 1: I have literally feed a raccoon in Prospect Park in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn eating a whole slice of It's. Yeah.
Speaker 3: They I mean, they're omnivores, so they're going to eat
Speaker 3: anything you know around. But we have done a ton
Speaker 3: of research in urban areas looking at movement patterns, home
Speaker 3: range sizes, because you have to get them right in
Speaker 3: the right spot for them to even find them.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the scope of the project now,
Speaker 1: Like what is the range of where you where you
Speaker 1: do this.
Speaker 3: We have a band of vaccine distribution zone that goes
Speaker 3: from Maine kind of across the Canada border down to
Speaker 3: Ohio and then pretty much straight down from Ohio to Alabama,
Speaker 3: and that's designed to stop the westward spread of raccoon
Speaker 3: Raby's and the northward spread into Canada.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, it's like a line of defense.
Speaker 3: Yep, exactly.
Speaker 1: Was that the notion when you started was the issue like, oh,
Speaker 1: rabies is spreading let's defend against the spread of rabies.
Speaker 3: Yes, So the story of raccoon rabies is a really
Speaker 3: interesting one. Raccoon rabies was first sort of documented in
Speaker 3: the late nineteen forties in Florida. But then there were
Speaker 3: some raccoon hunters from West Virginia, Virginia area who wanted
Speaker 3: to replenish their raccoon supply. They went down It was
Speaker 3: real commonplace back then to move raccoons around for raccoon hunting,
Speaker 3: so they went down south, got some raccoons, released them
Speaker 3: into an area on the Virginia West Virginia line and
Speaker 3: inevitably released some rabid raccoons without knowing it, and then
Speaker 3: raccoon rabies exploded from there. It reached most Northeastern states
Speaker 3: by the early nineties.
Speaker 1: And is there risk of raccoons passing rabies to humans?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely. Over the years there have been humans that
Speaker 3: have contracted raccoon rabies. Certainly, human health and safety is
Speaker 3: always paramount. Also animal health and safety. You know, every
Speaker 3: year there's there's about three hundred cats in the US
Speaker 3: that die from rabies. There's about fifty dogs that die
Speaker 3: from rabis. It's a cost benefit sort of program where
Speaker 3: what it costs us to manage our program is significantly
Speaker 3: less than what it costs the American public to live
Speaker 3: with rabies every year, just in terms of healthcare costs,
Speaker 3: you know, public education, post exposure, prophylaxis, all of that
Speaker 3: adds up really fast.
Speaker 1: So the program started in the nineties to stop the
Speaker 1: spread of raccoon rabies. Has it worked? Did it stop
Speaker 1: the spread of raccoon rabies?
Speaker 2: It did.
Speaker 3: After we distribute baits, about a month after, we go
Speaker 3: back into an area and we use live traps to
Speaker 3: catch raccoons, We take a blood sam pull from a
Speaker 3: pull a tooth, wigh them, sects them, takes some general
Speaker 3: notes on you know, their condition, and that blood sample
Speaker 3: get sent off to the lab and that tells us
Speaker 3: ultimately whether or not they have antibodies against rabies. And
Speaker 3: the tooth gives us their age and also tells us
Speaker 3: whether or not they ate the bait because the bait
Speaker 3: has a biomarker that stains their tooth. So that whole process,
Speaker 3: that's our monitoring program, along with all the surveillance we
Speaker 3: do where we do pick up dead raccoons off the
Speaker 3: road and test them for rabies. The centers for Disease Control.
Speaker 3: CDC has documented a seventy seven percent decline in raccoons
Speaker 3: with raccoon variants since our program began in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 3: so we know it's working. We've made significant progress in
Speaker 3: being able to move that zone to the east toward
Speaker 3: the ocean, which is what you know, our ultimate goal
Speaker 3: is that bait zone of containment, and then just keep
Speaker 3: marching it toward the ocean till, you know, till you've
Speaker 3: eliminated the variant.
Speaker 1: Right when you get to the sea, you're done. You're
Speaker 1: like marching to the sea.
Speaker 3: Yep, you're done.
Speaker 1: So so you've been doing this a long time. You
Speaker 1: are a wildlife biologist by training. I'm curious if your
Speaker 1: career has changed the way you feel about wildlife, about
Speaker 1: the relationship between humans and wildlife.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean I love all wildlife, you know. When
Speaker 3: I was in college getting my degree, you know, like
Speaker 3: any wildlife professional, I think you dream of, you know,
Speaker 3: working with polar bears or mountain lions or you know,
Speaker 3: some some big charismatic megafauna and you know, and I
Speaker 3: landed on raccoons, But I wouldn't change it for anything.
Speaker 3: That they're so smart, they have not made a trash
Speaker 3: can yet that they can't get into, or they're just
Speaker 3: you know, if you have ever seen one up close
Speaker 3: or I you know, I would encourage any listeners if
Speaker 3: they have the opportunity and they see one dead on
Speaker 3: the road. It sounds crazy, but just stop and look
Speaker 3: at it. They're fascinating animals. They have little hands, just
Speaker 3: like we do. They have an opposable thumb. Genetically, they're
Speaker 3: closer in origin to bears than they are to like
Speaker 3: cats and dogs and those kind of things. So they're
Speaker 3: just really smart animals. They think about what they're doing.
Speaker 3: We have a National Wildlife Research Center and they did
Speaker 3: a side study where they would put a marshmallow in
Speaker 3: the tub of water and the raccoons would learn that
Speaker 3: all they had to do was keep putting more rocks
Speaker 3: in the water till that marshmallow rose to the top
Speaker 3: and they could reach in and eat it. So that's
Speaker 3: just one example of how smart they are and how
Speaker 3: if they're given enough time, they'll figure something out.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your time. It was great
Speaker 1: to speak with you.
Speaker 3: Yeah you too, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Kathy Nelson is a wildlife biologist with the US Department
Speaker 1: of Agriculture. Thanks to both my guests today, Kathy Nelson
Speaker 1: and Monica Murphy. Next week on Incubation, I'm met on
Speaker 1: my mind that I have to go do it, but
Speaker 1: at a same time, I was going to deal with
Speaker 1: the beasts, which means I may not come back home alive.
Speaker 1: Incubation is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby
Speaker 1: Studio at iHeartMedia. It's produced by Kate Ferby and Brittany Cronin.
Speaker 1: The show is edited by Lacy Roberts. It's mastered by
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruguier, fact checking by Joseph friedman Or. Executive producers
Speaker 1: are Lacey Roberts and Matt Romano. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.