What Every Horse Owner Needs To Know About Rabies

Equine rabies is known to be a fatal disease. If any horse contracts this form of disease, it is hard to get a second chance to live. Each year, some good amount of horses dies due to this rabies infection and horse owners need to be extremely careful of that. Unless you vaccinate the horse, chances of these animals living seems to lessen with very passing day. We around 100 cases of rabies reported in animals like horses, burros and even donkeys on a yearly count, it is quite easy to disregard this option.

This incident of equine rabies in USA might be low, but the fatality rate remains high. It remains as high as 100%. On the other hand, there are higher chances of this disease transferring from horses to human beings in no time. So, right now, rabies vaccination is considered to be a core form of vaccine, well recommended by American Association of Equine Practitioners. It is recommended that horses should get vaccinated every year!

More about rabies:

Before you end up taking your horse to the vet to get the rabies vaccination, it is mandatory to know about the disease first. For that, you can head for the experts from TVG to get some info in this section. Rabies is considered to be a virus, which might cause some neurological disease, affecting all mammals.

• Whenever any animal is bitten, this virus will quickly migrate to brain, where it will start causing inflammation. This inflammation is also known as encephalitis.
• The disease is proven to be progressive quite rapidly and invariably fatal at the same time.
• The current incubation period, which is the time when the virus enters the body of mammal and onset of clinical signs, will be around an average of 2 to 9 weeks. But sometimes, it can stretch up to 15 months!
• Vets will often state that rabies might take a form of anything. Some horses might exhibit continuous or intermittent signs of aggression. Then you have another group of horses, who will seem depressed or even stuporous.
• There are some other horses, which might become anorexic and won’t drink. And then you have others who will overdose in eating and drinking before they die.
• Some of the common signs of rabies are lameness and even incoordination. So you better watch out for that!

Prevention is rather critical at this stage:

There are only a handful of diseases, which are more feared than rabies. One scariest feature of this disease is that it is quite hard to recognize among horses. Odds are low that a horse might get rabies, but that odds might grow if your horse came into contact with an infectious animal already. So, being very careful and preventive I the only way out over here. Be sure to check the health condition of your animal from time to time, even if everything seems okay from the top. You never know what’s going inside unless you got it treated under expert care and stringent guidance.