The Day of the Possum

This post is a little off topic, it has nothing to do with personal finance, careers or retirement.  It is simply a very unusual hunting tale and so if you are philosophically or morally opposed to hunting I’d advise skipping the rest.  

 I was listening to a podcast today, This American Life, it was their Halloween edition with darker stories.  And in it a woman walking in the woods near her house was attacked by a raccoon.  She saw the creature on the road walking toward her and waved her arms to scare it away, and it went into beast mode.  It charged her from a distance and although the woman fled the raccoon eventually ran her down in the snow and bit her.  She fought the 30 lb raccoon for half an hour until her family arrived and eventually killed it, with great difficulty.  It was unbelievably aggressive and almost supernaturally strong.    The reason for the aggression from what is normally a fairly docile animal was the fact that it had rabies.  The episode went on to detail the difficulties the woman had in getting the treatment for rabies within the golden window of 72 hours, after which, if you have contracted rabies its basically all over for you.  

Rabies does several things to the nervous system and metabolism of its victims.  In animals it turns off the fear center in the brain and turns on both adrenaline production and aggression.  So animals like a raccoon that would never attack anything bigger than themselves are driven to fearlessly attack anything they see in a fit of rage. The adrenaline also gives them a physical boost to their strength and speed.  It truly is like something out of a zombie movie, the ones where the zombies are lightning fast and incredibly strong.  

The reason I am telling you about this is because as I listened to the true story I realized it was shockingly similar to something that had happened to me twenty years ago.  Something that had always puzzled me greatly.   I’m an Arkansas native and I grew up hunting just about everything that moved and while I no longer actively hunt I do still own guns and my wife and I shoot targets and catch a lot of fish, which may trouble some of you who view animals and guns differently than we do.    

Back in those days my company lawyer and I shared a duck hunting lease just outside of Stuttgart, Arkansas, commonly known as the duck hunting capital of the world for its abundance of green head mallard ducks.  It was a slow season and I was riding my four wheeled ATV, what we call a four wheeler in redneck country. It was midday and we were through hunting, so I was just exploring the dirt roads around the big rice farm we leased.  I was alone and puttering down a long straight dirt road in the freezing cold.  I had my unloaded gun strapped to the front rack ( you can’t legally ride a four wheeler with a loaded gun for obvious safety reasons) and was enjoying the outdoors at a very low speed because it was way too cold to go fast.  

I noticed something white coming toward me in the road way off in the distance, maybe a quarter mile away.  I thought maybe a goose or a rabbit or somebody’s bird dog and I just put my bike in park and left the motor running and watched it coming my way.  The closer it got the more confused I became because it was seriously starting to look like a giant white rat, and rats do not come running toward noisy four wheelers or toward humans.  This was perfectly flat rice land, you could see for a mile in every direction so there was no way this creature could have been unaware of my presence.  There were no houses for miles so it wasn’t likely somebody’s pet ferret or ermine but since it was closing the distance I knew I’d be able to discern what it was in the next little while.  It was small so I never even considered getting my shotgun off the rack and loading it, small animals do not attack humans, at least not when they have ample opportunity to escape.  And rather than avoiding me this thing was choosing to approach me.  I decided it must be somebody’s exotic pet.

Eventually, when it was within maybe fifty yards, I could see it was clearly a possum, or opossum to be scientifically correct.  As I’m sure you know possums are rat like, mostly nocturnal marsupials that are pretty common in rural areas and often forage in garages looking for stores of pet-food or other tasty morsels.  They are not aggressive and are famous for faking their own deaths with involuntary seizures that leave them  perfectly still, as a defense mechanism.  They secrete a foul smell when this happens so they not only look dead but smell like they have been dead for days, awesome, right?  They will bare their teeth and hiss if cornered but they are never overtly aggressive.  They also avoid all human contact since they are small, slow and poorly armed for combat. 

I was very puzzled by this as the little guy picked up his pace and headed right for me sitting on my rumbling four wheeler.  I had decided by now that if he wasn’t a pet that he was blind and deaf and I expected him to pass by me on the road and keep going wherever he was going.  I wasn’t threatened in the slightest because he was, you know, a possum! But just as he got within maybe three feet he bolted toward my bike and climbed up one side, he was clearly trying to get to me.  At that point I thought crazy possum, crazy possum and the thought clicked in my mind that maybe he had rabies.  I managed to jerk my shotgun off the rack as I rolled out of my seat and ran a few yards away while the possum jumped off the four wheeler and came after me.  I realized the absurdity of a ten pound animal attacking a 170 lb human armed with a twelve gauge semi-automatic shotgun, while at the same time realizing that if he did have rabies he was life threateningly dangerous.  

I never killed animals for fun, we ate what we killed.  So I never shot a non game animal like a possum that was just doing his animal thing, but this was different.  If this animal was rabid then it not only was already dying a terrible death but might well spread the virus to other animals and or even end up biting a child.  So I slid a cartridge into my shotgun and killed it as it came toward me.  I hoped it was the right choice.

Because a twelve gauge shotgun fires a giant load of steel pellets it is a fearsome weapon at close range.  All that remained of the opossum was a crater in the road where he had been a moment before I fired.  Bits of mud and potentially bits of possum sprayed everywhere since he was almost on me when I pulled the trigger.  Some of the debris landed in one of my eyes.  I didn’t think about that at first but when I got back to the camp house it occurred to me that rabies might well be transferred from the animal’s blood through my eye tissue so I called an animal control expert and was told that possums are immune to rabies and can’t carry the virus.  I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to get shots but also very puzzled at the animal’s behavior.  If he wasn’t rabid why did he attack me?  I chalked it up as one of life’s mysteries.  

That brings me back to the podcast I heard this morning about the rabid raccoon.  It was so similar to my experience that I did an internet search on the topic and found out that possums can indeed catch rabies.  I had been misinformed twenty years earlier!  Because marsupials run a very low body temperature, compared to other mammals, they are less likely to catch rabies. However there have been documented cases in the past of rabid opossums.  I had mixed emotions upon learning that. On the plus side I felt better about having killed it because it probably was rabid, but I also felt a shudder run through me because I never sought treatment based on what an “expert” friend told me.  I guess all that hit me in the eye was a little bit of mud, but the fact that I could have ended up with one of the worst imaginable, hopeless, painful and terminal diseases is a stark thought.

Lessons learned?  Don’t just make a cursory investigation if an issue could have life changing impact.  Find indisputable facts when it comes to your finances, your health and your relationships because there is a lot of false information out there.  Even my internet search today turned up at least one web article that declared possums are “immune” to rabies and can’t carry the virus.  That’s simply untrue and it could have cost me my life.  Second, when you are faced with something unpleasant that you do not want to do, don’t let emotion get in the way of doing what you know is the best thing.  I did not want to kill a harmless little critter,  but I could not come up with a more likely reason for its behavior than rabies.  And if it had rabies it was a mercy to end its suffering and prudent to stop the possible spread of the virus.

What about you?  Have you ever been in a situation where your mind could not process what you were seeing yet you were forced to make a decision in spite of not understanding what was happening? 

Have you ever thought you knew the facts about something only to find out you were completely wrong and only luck kept you from suffering the consequences of your ignorance?