MEXICO — A feral cat captured on Oct. 6 near the Dixfield line and spayed the next day in Norway tested positive for rabies on Monday, Becky McDonald of River Valley Animal Advocates said.
McDonald believes the Maine coon cat mix, named “Tough Mommy” by its rescuers, contracted rabies from a raccoon that attacked her in August.
However, the symptoms didn’t materialize until last week while she was recovering from being spayed, McDonald said.
“She started showing signs of aggression and went downhill fast,” she said.
“She was fine for a while, and then all of a sudden, she just started attacking anything that got near the cage,” McDonald said.
She said that when Tough Mommy began acting aggressively, “she also quickly began to get really sick with neurological symptoms that led us to believe she had problems. Fortunately, no one was bitten and no one was scratched.”
The cat was contained in a cage and had no contact with other cats or animals at McDonald’s house in Canton.
Tough Mommy was the last remaining cat of a feral colony from which Animal Advocates spent two years trapping, rescuing and fixing cats, McDonald said.
“The site that we took it out of, it’s very close to Dixfield — on the Mexico-Dixfield border — and, of course, there are a lot of people around there,” she said.
She said animal control officers and the Maine Warden Service have been notified.
“The situation is being handled, but we really dodged a bullet in that we knew the whole history of the site and who was there and who wasn’t, and she was the last one,” McDonald said, declining to divulge the site.
“We don’t give out the places exactly where we take cats out of, but we call it our Mexico No. 1 site,” she said. “So there are no cats running around rabid (there). There may be raccoons, but there are no cats left there and that’s the situation.”
Tough Mommy was the first to have rabies of the nearly 200 feral cats that the group has rescued and spayed and neutered since the nonprofit formed in October 2009.
They work with animal control officers in Rumford, Mexico, Dixfield, Peru, Canton, Carthage and Andover and take care of feral cat colonies.
“We’ve never had the rabies thing and we’ve taken care of a lot of ferals,” McDonald said. “Last year, we spayed and neutered 79 cats. This year, we’ve done almost 100.”
In August, Animal Advocates trapped and rescued one of Tough Mommy’s kittens and got two more in September. The kittens are now quarantined to determine whether they, too, have rabies, she said. They had not shown symptoms, as of Tuesday.
“According to the state, as long as they stay symptom-free and stay contained, and we know exactly where they are and that they’re being contained, hopefully, the kittens will survive,” she said.
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- This feral cat named “Tough Mommy” from Mexico was captured by the River Valley Animal Advocates recently and spayed. Last week, however, the mother cat, whose kittens were rescued last month, showed symptoms of rabies while in a cage in Canton. She was euthanized Oct. 14 and tested positive for rabies on Monday, Becky McDonald of River Valley Animal Advocates said Tuesday.
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- Two kittens rescued from a former feral cat colony in Mexico near the Dixfield town line were quarantined in Canton on Tuesday after their mother tested positive for rabies, Becky McDonald of the River Valley Animal Advocates said Tuesday afternoon.
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