That Rabid Fox story

Chino Valley woman battles rabid fox
By T.M. Shultz, Courtesy of the Daily Courier
Thursday, November 06, 2008

A Chino Valley woman must undergo a series of rabies shots after battling a sick fox that bit her twice.
Thirty-year-old Michelle Felicepta said she was jogging late Monday afternoon on her favorite trail at the base of Granite Mountain when she saw the fox coming down onto the trail ahead of her. She stopped as the 10- to 15-pound animal turned and faced her. "I knew something was wrong when its eyes locked in on me," Felicepta said Wednesday during a telephone interview. As she started backing away, the fox lunged at her and bit her foot. Then it went for her knee. As it did, the woman instinctively grabbed it by the neck, trying to pull it away. "As soon as I grabbed its neck, it started thrashing and grabbed my left arm," Felicepta continued. The fox bit down hard, drawing blood. "The teeth were in real deep," Felicepta recalled.
She started looking around for a stick to pry its mouth open, but couldn't find one.
"I was choking him with my right hand and each time I (loosened) up my grip a little, he got a little bit of air and he'd start thrashing around and kind of screaming." Finally, believing the fox was rabid and knowing authorities would need to test it to make sure, she decided to run back to her car - parked about a mile and a half away - with the fox's mouth still clamped on her arm, her right hand gripped tightly around its throat. "Thank god for adrenaline," Felicepta said.
After reaching her car and popping open the trunk, she managed to pry the fox's mouth open. "I'd been choking that thing the whole time," Felicepta said, laughing at her own ferocity. She yanked off her sweatshirt, wrapped it around the fox and flung the animal into her trunk "as hard as I could," she added. Next, she hopped into her car and drove herself to Yavapai Regional Medical Center. On the way there, she finally got scared. "That's when it kind of sunk in," Felicepta said.
At the hospital, the fox also bit a Yavapai County Animal Control Officer as the officer was getting the animal out of the trunk, said Dwight D'Evelyn, spokesman for the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. On Tuesday, the Arizona State Health Laboratory in Phoenix tested the fox and confirmed it had rabies. Felicepta will get five rabies shots over the next few weeks. The animal control officer will get only two or three because he had already received a pre-exposure rabies vaccination, D'Evelyn said.
Arizona's public health veterinarian, Elisabeth Lawaczeck, said Felicepta did the best she could under difficult circumstances. "It's kind of just bad luck when you're on a trail and get attacked," Lawaczeck said. Last year Yavapai County had six confirmed cases of rabies in wild animals. So far this year it has recorded 10. That's not unusual, Lawaczeck said. "Rabies is a cyclical disease because it wipes out the population that has it," she explained.