falconspace

Rabid vampire bats attack Brazilian children
by Gaia Vince
3 November 2005
NewScientist.com

Brazilian children are being menaced while they sleep by rabid vampire bats that have killed 23 people and bitten more than 1300 since September.

The winged creatures enter people’s homes at night and suck blood from the youngsters’ face or fingers. The Brazilian authorities attribute the large proportion of children attacked – 18 of the 23 killed were minors – to the fact that youngsters sleep more soundly than adults and are less likely to be disturbed by the bats.

“A vampire bat bite does not leave a gaping wound – it’s more like a small graze. Many people don’t even realise they’ve been bitten,” says Tony Fooks, head of the Rabies and Wildlife Zoonoses Group at the UK’s Veterinary Laboratory Agency in Weybridge, Surrey.

Untreated, rabies is almost always fatal – the virus attacks the central nervous system causing severe pain, confusion and a highly disturbed mental state which includes phobias, often including hydrophobia, the fear of water. However, if an anti-rabies vaccine is administered within 24 hours of the bite, the survival rate is high.

Plugging the gaps

The attacks have all taken place at night time in the northern Brazilian state of Maranhao. The state health authority does not know how many of those bitten may have been infected with rabies, but has treated 1350 people with anti-rabies vaccines so far. They have also been spraying bats from infected colonies with poison in the hope that they fly back to their roosts and kill off others.

“Vampire bats are usually shy of humans, but rabies makes them lose their shyness and seek humans for a blood meal,” Fooks told New Scientist.

Many homes in the marshland area have gaps in the floor and ceiling and no screens on the windows. Residents have been advised to stay in at night, to sleep under mosquito nets and to cover gaps in their houses with banana leaves or cloth, the Maranhao newspaper O Imparcial reports.

“Just like with malaria, sleeping under mosquito nets is a very successful preventative, but the poorest people, who have the houses which offer the worst protection, cannot afford nets,” says Sarah Cleaveland, a rabies expert at the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Cattle feed

Rabies outbreaks have occurred every year in Brazil since 1986, but the authorities say that this year's is particularly severe. Blood-seeking vampire bats continually prey on cattle and horses in the region. The debilitating effect of the bites and the diseases the bats spread are a major economic burden.

The increasing rabies problem is being blamed on two connected factors. Deforestation of the Amazon is forcing thousands of bats from their natural habitat and into close contact with humans. Furthermore, trees are often cleared to provide a home for cattle, which provides a rich food source for the bats, leading to much larger colonies.

Authorities in the area have worked hard over the past few years to control the rabies problem in dogs, but bat infestations are proving more difficult. The only solution at the moment is preventing bites. Attempted mass culls have been unsuccessful since the bats inhabit hidden pockets in hard-to-reach caves.

Researchers are working towards rabies vaccination treatments for bats which they hope could provide an alternative solution.

Related Articles

* Rabies cases spark emergency action
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624934.800
* 02 April 2005
* Interview: The virus hunter
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524831.300
* 22 January 2005
* Tobacco plant produces human rabies antibodies
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3790
* 02 June 2003

Weblinks

* UK’s Veterinary Laboratory Agency in Weybridge
* http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/vla/
* Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, UK
* http://www.vet.ed.ac.uk/ctvm/NEW%20CTVM.htm
* Brazil Ministry of Health
* http://portal.saude.gov.br/saude/
* O Imparcial
* http://www.oimparcial.com.br/
* Rabies, US National Centre for Infectious Diseases
* http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/rabies/

Man Kills Buck With Bare Hands in Bedroom
Yahoo! News 2 November 2005

For 40 exhausting minutes, Wayne Goldsberry battled a buck with his bare hands in his daughter's bedroom.

Goldsberry finally subdued the five-point whitetail deer that crashed through a bedroom window at his daughter's home Friday. When it was over, blood splattered the walls and the deer lay dead on the bedroom floor, its neck broken.

Goldsberry was at his daughter's home when he heard glass breaking. He went back to check on the noise and found the deer.

"I was standing about like this peeking around the corner when the deer came out of the bedroom," said Goldsberry. The deer ran down the hall and into the master bedroom — "jumping back and forth across the bed."

Goldsberry, about 6-feet-1 and 200 pounds, entered the bedroom to confront the deer and, after a brief struggle, emerged to tell his wife to call police. After returning to the bedroom, the fight continued. Goldsberry finally was able to grip the animal and twist its neck, killing it.

Goldsberry, sore from the struggle, dragged the dead animal out of the house.

"He got kicked several times. He was walking bowlegged for a while," Deputy Doug Gay said.

At this time of year, a buck that sees its reflection in a window often charges, believing it is fighting off a rival, Gay said.

Goldsberry had the deer butchered.

"He's in the freezer," the man said before walking to the kitchen and showing off pounds of freshly wrapped venison.

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press.

Why your dog is smarter than a wolf
by Colin Woodard
Christian Science Monitor
26 October 2005

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - At Eotvos Lorand University's Department of Ethology, visitors are usually greeted not by a security guard, but by a delegation of friendly mongrels, tails wagging. Dogs have the run of the place. They play in classrooms, visit faculty members in their offices, or nap in the laboratories. Animals here are no surprise - ethology is the zoological study of animal behavior - but the total lack of cages is.

And why would there be, asks research fellow Adam Miklosi, who leads much of the research here into the cognitive abilities of man's best friend.

"If you were studying human behavior, you wouldn't keep your subjects in a cage for 20 years and then ask them some questions?" he asks with a smile. "These are animals who've been brought up in a normal way, which allows us to see and understand them in their natural environment, which is the human environment."

After a decade studying dogs in their human habitat, Mr. Miklosi and his colleagues have accumulated a body of evidence suggesting that dogs have far greater mental capabilities than scientists had thought. Dogs' smarts, it turns out, come out in their relationships with people.

The implications of this research are more esoteric than the average dog owner may appreciate. The research doesn't exactly mean that dogs and their masters can enjoy Chaucer together, but it does mean scientists have reason to consider what dog-human communications may say about language skills development.

Another implication is that dogs may make better cognitive study subjects than primates, which have been the focus of the field thus far.

Until recently, domestication was thought to have dulled dogs' intelligence. Studies in the early 1980s showed that wolves, from which dogs probably descended, can unlock a gate after watching a human do it once, while dogs remained stumped after watching repeatedly.

That never sat well with Vilmos Csanyi, the recently retired head of Mr. Miklosi's department. Mr. Csanyi, who had dogs of his own, suspected the dogs were awaiting permission to open the gate, that they regarded opening the gate as a violation of their master's rules.

In 1997, Csanyi and his colleagues tested 28 dogs of various ages, breeds, and closeness to their owners, to see if they could learn to obtain cold cuts on the other side of a fence by pulling on the handles of dishes while their owners were present. Dogs with a close relationship to their owners fared worse than outdoor dogs. But when the dogs' owners were allowed to give the animals verbal permission, the gap between the groups vanished.

Since then, Csanyi's team has demonstrated just how much dogs can accomplish by paying attention to people. In one classic experiment on dogs' use of human visual cues, food is hidden in one of several scent-proof containers. The animal is allowed to choose only one. Beforehand, the experimenter signals the correct choice by staring, nodding, or pointing at it. Chimpanzees, humans' closest genetic relatives, have always done poorly at this test. Dogs solved the problem immediately.

Dogs also excel at imitating people. In one of the laboratories, graduate student Zsofia Viranyi demonstrates with Todor, an enthusiastic little mutt. Todor sits attentively as Ms. Viranyi spins around in a circle and comes to a stop. "Csinal," she says. ("You do it!") Todor does a little 360 on the tiled floor and lets out an enthusiastic bark. He easily imitates Viranyi's bow, lifting of an arm, and other tasks.

The team found that some dogs can even imitate previously unseen actions performed by a person they haven't had close contact with. Other dogs learned how to operate a simple ball-dispensing machine by watching people use it.

"We thought it would be very difficult for dogs to imitate humans," Csanyi says, Chimps have great difficulty doing so, even with their larger brains. "But it turns out [dogs] love to do it. This is not a little thing, because they must pay attention to the person's actions, remember them, and then apply them to their own body."

Dogs' unusual ability and motivation to observe, imitate, and communicate with people appears to be with them from birth. Two years ago, Csanyi's graduate students were given either a puppy or a wolf cub to raise. They fed the animals by hand, coddling and doting on them.

At five weeks, each cub was placed in a room containing an adult and the student who had raised the cub. Both sat motionless. But while the wolf cubs merely sniffed both humans before climbing into the student's lap to sleep, the puppies yipped at their caregivers, licking their hands and trying to establish contact.

Three months later, the canines were given the opportunity to try to remove a piece of meat from under a cage by pulling on a rope in the presence of their caregiver. Dogs and wolves both mastered this promptly. Then the rope was anchored, making it impossible to obtain the meat. The dogs tried a couple of times, then turned to their masters for assistance or cues. The wolves ignored their caregivers, yanking on the rope until exhausted.

"The wolves ... were only interested in the meat," notes Miklosi. "The dogs were of course interested in the meat, but knew that one way to get it might be to figure out what the human wants them to do."

To Csanyi, this proves that dogs have acquired an innate ability to pay attention to people, and thus to communicate and work with them. This is a skill that wolves don't assume even when raised from birth to learn it.

Dogs are "very motivated to cooperate with and behave like people," says Csanyi. "That's why dogs can do things no other animal can do."