A quick cat, a bad raccoon - and crutches

View larger image Jonathan Grimsley stands outside his home at the corner of West Spring and Shaffer streets in Woodstock with Buzz, a Siamese cat that eluded a raccoon Sunday. Rich Cooley/Daily

Animal creates chaos at birthday party before meeting its demise

By Amber Marra - amarra@nvdaily.com

WOODSTOCK -- A family pet was nearly quarantined by the Shenandoah County Department of Health on Tuesday after being chased by a potentially rabid raccoon near a birthday party over the weekend.

Pam Romick, of Strasburg, said she was at her great-niece's birthday party on Sunday when she noticed a cat being chased around Spring and Shaffer streets in Woodstock.

The cat, a blue point Siamese named Buzz, was running frantically from the raccoon, Romick said. Buzz belongs to Jonathan Grimsley and Faith Gilkey, of 407 Spring St., whose home shares a yard with 330 Shaffer St., where the party was being held.

Eventually, the raccoon chased Buzz through the open door of the basement of the Spring Street property where Gilkey's son, Jacob Davis, was standing. Davis said that as soon as the raccoon ran into the basement after Buzz it turned its attention on him.

That is when Davis had to spring into action with the closest thing he could grab: A crutch.

"My son controlled the situation quickly," Gilkey said.

As Davis ran out of the basement, he beat the hissing raccoon to death with the crutch unbeknownst to a dozen or so children ages 5 to 10 playing nearby, according to Romick.

"I know it was vicious to beat it to death and it horrified me, but it was running right toward a group of children," she said.

After the incident, Romick was concerned that the raccoon might have been rabid because it was "very odd" to see it aggressively chasing a cat in the middle of the day, considering a raccoon's nocturnal habits.

As a result, she reported the incident to the Health Department, which did not come test the raccoon carcass because at the time it did not appear to have made contact with anyone or the cat, according to Environmental Health Manager Scott Fincham.

"If there is no contact it takes a lot of questioning. Did any fluids touch you? How did you dispose of the animal?" Fincham said.

Grimsley said he kept the raccoon carcass in a shed until Tuesday, when he called Woodstock town employees to collect and dispose of the animal.

Determining whether the raccoon was rabid was then a matter of life or death for Buzz on Tuesday afternoon, as Grimsley and Gilkey searched for any sign of bites or scratches on the cat's body.

According to the Centers for Disease Control Compendium of Animal Rabies Prevention and Control Report of 2008, unvaccinated cats who do have contact with a rabid animal should be euthanized immediately. Gilkey could not be sure whether Buzz was vaccinated because of a lack of shot records, and was unwilling to euthanize him, in which case the CDC recommends that the animal be placed in quarantine for six months as an alternative.

Luckily for the feline, no signs of contact were found.

"We do try to reach out to every single person who reports possible rabid animals because just because a human isn't exposed we have to make sure, in this case, the cat wasn't exposed," Fincham said. "[Raccoons] are an animal that has high numbers when it comes to rabies."