Thoughts on vaccinations.

Granted, if you keep your pets' vaccinations up to date, the following would not be a problem. HOWEVER. Say that in the past, you have not been able to afford a $65 shot plus a $100 visit to procure said shot for your pets - making $165 a year per pet. Say your pets are exposed to rabies.

If a human is exposed to rabies, you test the bat, and in the meantime, you get a metric buttload of shots to keep yourself from getting sick. We all know this, right? Please explain to me why, exactly, there is no such thing for pets. If your pet is exposed to rabies and the test comes back that the animal in question is rabid, YOU WILL NOT KNOW WHETHER OR NOT YOUR PET ACTUALLY HAS RABIES, BUT YOU WILL HAVE TO PUT THE PET DOWN.

There's no test to tell you if your pet actually has it, if it's been bitten (unless it's pretty obvious that the pet has been bitten), if your pet actually is developing rabies. There's no "cure" to fix this - you can put a dog in quarantine for six months (on your dime, mind you), but if the pet in question is a cat, the cat must be put down, because cats would have to be double-caged for the quarantine, and cats really don't like being caged.

There is nothing you can do but pray that rabies check on the animal who bit your pet comes back negative. Please explain to me why we have not developed something akin to the buttload of shots that humans get for animals. I don't quite understand why we haven't worked on this issue - putting down animals that may or may not actually have rabies? Isn't that a little inhumane? Isn't that just a bit cruel? We can put tiny little chips into an animal that can be scanned if it gets lost. We can treat a diabetic cat the same way we treat human diabetics. We can treat cancer, prolong life, we can send monkeys to the moon, and we haven't made any progress whatsoever as far as rabies and pets?

Who thought up this brilliance? Put the word out - if you know anyone in the veterinary industry that develops products, let me know, and maybe we can get a petition up.

In the meantime, I'm going to go hope like hell that test comes back negative...