After surviving an attack with a rabid raccoon April 1, Dan Scuorzo hopes families and especially children watch out for wild animals. A week after his encounter at the Padebco Boat Yard in Round Pond where he works, Scuorzo continues to return to Miles Memorial Hospital where he has received six shots as a precautionary treatment.
“The thing was crazy,” Scuorzo said, still sounding a little nervous as he recalled the situation in the boat building where he spent some time with the furious critter. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He said he had been working on the decking on one of the boats in the building, chatting with his boss, who was down on the ground floor, roughly eight feet below and out of sight. Scuorzo said the building’s door was open at the time and he did not realize his boss had left when he heard a funny noise.
Standing to ask his boss what the ridiculous sounding noise was, Scuorzo saw the raccoon. He was not aware the animal was rabid at the time and even thought, having had some experience with animals in the past, he could coax the raccoon out of the building.
Seconds after Scuorzo descended the boat’s ladder and started toward the door, the raccoon charged him. He scrambled back up the ladder with the raccoon close on his heels. Scuorzo grabbed a boat fender and beat the raccoon back down the ladder. Three times after he knocked the raccoon off the ladder the animal came back up the ladder for additional attacks.
“I knew something was terribly wrong,” Scuorzo said, as he recalled the raccoon’s relentless pursuit.
He leaped from the boat he had been working on to another boat next to it and tried to use his cell phone to call for help. The steel building blocked his signal and Scuorzo thought he was out of luck, trapped in this steel building with a rabid raccoon and no way out, until he saw the house phone attached to the wall nearest the boat he had just boarded.
Scuorzo grabbed the phone off the hook and called his boss’s wife, “PJ”. He told her the situation and a short while later, fellow boatyard employee Mike Greenleaf arrived with his one-ton pickup truck.
Hearing the engine, Scuorzo shouted out to Greenleaf and told him to watch out, to not come in the building. When Scuorzo saw the raccoon go into a bathroom, he told Greenleaf the coast looked clear.
The raccoon was not to be fooled, however, and scurried after Greenleaf, who closed the door just in time. The raccoon just missed snagging Greenleaf by the heel of his boot.
Likely hearing Scuorzo shout out, the raccoon found the ladder attached to the other boat he had boarded and began to climb. Scuorzo found a boat hook and fought off the raccoon as it tried to get on board.
“I was fighting that thing hard,” he said. “It wanted a piece of me bad.”
Scuorzo said the raccoon scuttled up a ramp that ran along the wall of the building by the boatyard office. He said the upper level of the ramp would give the raccoon access to the boat he stood on, as it was so close to the boat’s edge.
They stared at each other.
“He was like, ‘If I can’t get at you on the ladder, I’m getting there another way,'” Scuorzo said.
That eerie moment when Scuorzo felt the raccoon knew he could get on the boat, after having such a battle with him for so long, and the pause as the two stared at one another, was enough for Scuorzo to leap off the ship’s bow to the concrete floor below.
He ran out of the building fearing the threat of his life short behind and reunited with Greenleaf by the truck. Scuorzo said the animal slowly waddled out of the building as if nothing had happened and then charged them both.
The two men climbed into the back of the pickup truck, where the raccoon was unable to reach. Scuorzo said the raccoon tried to get up into the truck, but the sides were too high.
The raccoon then sauntered across the street to a house where Scuorzo believes a veterinarian lives.
“I was totally terrified,” Scuorzo said, adding he saw Greenleaf’s hands and knees shaking.
The raccoon crossed the street and entered the driveway just as the woman who owns the home drove up in her car with two dogs inside. Scuorzo said he heard the dogs barking in the car. He guessed he and Greenleaf were standing in the truck roughly 125 yards away.
The two men shouted at the woman not to get out of her car and to watch out. Scuorzo saw the woman look down at the raccoon as it scampered around her car and then entered a kennel on the side of her house.
He saw her get out of the car and locked the raccoon in the cage. Scuorzo said he shouted out to her to be careful. He saw her go inside the house and learned she had closed and locked the pet door joining the kennel and house.
Scuorzo said she called 911 and emergency personnel responded shortly afterward. It took two hours for Animal Damage Control Agent Michael Witte of the Dept. of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and other animal emergency personnel to capture the animal. After euthanizing the raccoon, they confirmed it had rabies.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Witte said, adding this makes the sixth case of rabies in Lincoln County so far this year.
According to Witte, the raccoon also attacked another Round Pond resident, Gordon Fossett, who fortunately was wearing thermal underwear, long pants and large boots that protected him from bites and the animal’s saliva.
Scuorzo said Center for Disease Control officials asked him a number of questions including whether he had any cuts or open wounds on his hands and if he came into contact with the raccoon’s saliva. Scuorzo said he couldn’t remember if the saliva had got on him, but regularly gets cuts on his hands from work.
He wasn’t convinced at the time the raccoon had rabies. Scuorzo said he saw the raccoon had porcupine quills stuck in its face and had been pawing at a bucket of water. He suspected the animal had just had a fight with a porcupine, was angry and thirsty.
“Rabies didn’t even come into my head,” he said. “I was just fighting him off.”
After getting his shots and speaking with medical personnel, Scuorzo learned it is relatively easy for a human to get infected with rabies. One does not need to get bitten by a rabid animal; the saliva with rabies bacteria in it is enough to spread the infection.
Scuorzo said getting the shots is no fun; they burn and are painful. He felt hot and feverish. Medical personnel gave him a tetanus shot, a rabies shot and other shots to pump up his immune system to fight the rabies bacteria. He wouldn’t want to see other people go through the same experience.
“You’ve got a bunch of kids out there, and you don’t know what could’ve happened,” he said. “I don’t want to see people go through that. It was a terrible thing.”
With the warm weather and mild winter temperatures, animals are moving about more, Witte said. He said most animals infected with rabies are sick enough they don’t do much. It is only in the later stages of the disease, animals show the symptoms the raccoon had. The infamous frothing of the mouth comes from the animal continuously chewing, having to chew something, as the bacteria has made its way through the animal’s nervous system and its brain has turned to mush.
According to the Center for Disease Control, once symptoms of the disease start, few survive. If untreated, rabies leads to coma and death. Symptoms include signs of the flu, such as general weakness and fever, accompanied by an itching sensation around the bite wound. The symptoms progress to feelings of anxiety and agitation, then delirium and hallucinations. Online sources say the time between infection and sickness is an average of 3 – 7 weeks.
It is important to seek medical help right away if bitten by an animal.
“Make sure your domesticated animals are vaccinated (against rabies), and warn children to stay away from wild animals,” Witte said.