Bitten By A Prairie Dog: Can The Net Save The Day?

Dear readers: Can the Internet save a mother of two from dying of rabies? Unfortunately, I recently had the chance to find out.

I share my house with 15 mammals, four birds and a turtle, along with two children and a husband and one computer per human. (The dog has to share computer No. 5 with the cats.) Some of the more exotic of my mammals are real biters.

Recently, my two prairie dogs - the "girls," I call them - chewed through the metal latch on their cage, thumped to the kitchen floor and walked solemnly over to the dog's dish, where - to the dog's dismay - they began eating her supper as if they had been robotically programmed to do so.

The girls' solemnity vanished, however, when I tried to pick them up. Buttercup bit me in her normal, flustered "I don't really mean this" way, while Daisy sank her teeth way, way into the joint at the base of my right forefinger. By midnight the finger was twice its normal size and throbbing with pain.

The doctor at the local emergency room told me he couldn't treat me without first hearing from a vet who could determine what I should be treated for. Were prairie dogs "nonsick carriers" of rabies? In other words, could they carry the disease without displaying any symptoms themselves? "You'll need to find out within the next 24 hours," he said, somewhat dauntingly.

Well. Because I live in rural New England, where was I to find a vet - at midnight - who knew anything about prairie dogs? . . . Of course! Go online and ask the experts there!

I sometimes suspect that every pet owner in the United States is on America Online. AOL's Pet Care Forum message boards - keywords: PET CARE - are the only AOL areas I visit daily. They've taught me that my dachshund will never be housebroken, provided me with a recipe to remedy calcium deficiency in my sugar gliders, and strained my husband's credulity (he refuses to believe a posting on the message board called "Your Bird Said WHAT?," in which a parrot asks, "Am I beautiful?" and, on hearing a "yes," replies "I thought so").

Anyway, I posted queries under "Exotic Vets" and "Small Mammals and Exotic Pets," wondering whether I'd drop dead within the next few days if I wasn't vaccinated.

The next morning, I expected to find a flood of supportive answers; but actually, no one responded for a day or so. I searched the Web. There I found many informative pages about the care and raising of prairie dogs, but nothing that told me whether I was going to die of rabies.

In the meantime, my own vet called and told me I'd better be vaccinated just in case. This accomplished, I returned home to find an e-mail from an extremely reputable prairie dog breeder. Prairie dogs, he said, do not carry rabies and never have. That night, a lone message appeared on the prairie dog message board: "My vet says prairie dogs do not carry rabies."

What's the lesson in all this? There are two, actually. I now know that I should wear oven mitts if I have to grab a prairie dog in a hurry. And the next time I need online information, I'll try to research a topic with a slightly longer deadline.

(Copyright, 1996, United Feature Syndicate)

Dear Cyberlady appears occasionally in the Personal Technology section of The Seattle times. Send questions to Dear Cyberlady, c/o The Seattle Times, P.O. Box 70, Seattle, WA 98111, or e-mail at: cyberlady@unitedmedia.com.