Real signs of the deadly virus, Rabies.
Back with the wild dog pack later in the morning the Alpha female was the first wild dog to show the characteristic signs of rabies. While all the others rested she was restless and biting at branches, logs and soil. And then hassling the other dogs, biting them until they ran away.
Seeing Floppy’s condition together with these symptoms exhibited by the Alpha female it was almost conclusive to me that rabies was the killer. I had seen many jackal die of the disease in Etosha National Park.
So we decided immediately to go ahead and try inoculate the whole pack.
The rabies vaccine only works about 25% of the time in wild dogs. And also sometimes if a healthy dog is vaccinated, it can contract the disease. This being one of the reasons why we held off doing it earlier.
By mid afternoon we were into action inoculating the pack. It was while doing this that we got a radio call to say the head we’d sent in 2 weeks ago had tested positive. (That was fast!!!)
At least we now knew for sure what was going on and we were doing the right thing.
We managed to do all the dogs except Skrik and Club, as we ran out of light.
We had also planned on euthanasia for the Alpha female and Floppy so they couldn’t infect more of the dogs. But ran out of daylight hours for that too.
Back out at dawn the dogs were in the donga systems near Gananda crossing and impossible to get to. When we eventually did get to them they had been on the move, but we found them with bloodstained faces, which was great news in that many of them had fed. But right there with them, they watched 3 hyaena feeding on Floppy’s body. He had probably died in the night.
The pack moved on east. And today they looked like a perfectly normal pack. Having the little feed had made all the difference.
And the Alpha female was not showing any strange symptoms anymore. She too seemed normal.
I know if I hadn’t been with the pack yesterday to see the state of Floppy and the Alpha female’s behaviour, I would have had no reason to think there was anything wrong with the them.
And so I was grateful we hadn’t put the Alpha female down. Instead we inoculated her too. But there has never been a record of any animal surviving rabies once into the symptom stage. It is just such a hard decision to make on a heavily pregnant dog that I’ve grown so attached to and spent so many days with. But I also don’t want her infecting all the other dogs if she hasn’t done so already.
With the dogs resting at Nhoro pan we were able to finish darting Skrik and Club.
The dogs are so trusting when we dart them. They’ll all suddenly jump up in alarm, look around to see what is causing the disturbance, not thinking it could be us in that they trust us so much, and then lying down back where they were.
They have just become trusting of us and now it looks like we might lose them all. I just hope they have some idea we are trying to help.
In the late morning we left the dogs at Nhoro pan in slightly better spirits as the pack was looking so much better.
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