Rabies is regarded by most of us as a very scary disease that makes you crazy, makes you foam at the mouth, and then kills you. Raccoons have a bad reputation for being carriers of rabies. Although there is no doubt that raccoons, like people, can get rabies, they are not necessarily more susceptible to it than your dog. If a raccoon, or any animal for that matter get rabies (except humans that can receive shots to prevent the disease from taking its ultimate course) it will die.

Rabies is a virus. It can only be transferred from one mammal to another during a very short contagious stage when the animal is close to death. You can detect an animal with rabies if you see it acting very aggressively for no reason, acting confused and walking in circles, possibly dragging its legs partially paralyzed, or foaming at the mouth. It is in the animal’s saliva by which rabies is most frequently transferred.

Just because you see a raccoon walking around in the daytime does not mean it is rabid, unless it is showing these other symptoms. It is probably just hungry or can’t sleep. If an animal looks and is acting healthy, then it probably is.

In terms of being able to get rabies from a raccoon, that is pretty rare and there have been only less than a handful of reported cases in which raccoons have given rabies to humans. Rabies is most often reported in raccoons, as opposed to skunks, foxes, groundhogs, and bats which also are susceptible, because raccoons are more likely to live close to humans. So we tend to see them more than other wild animals. Squirrels, chipmunks, mice, rats, and rabbits can sometimes get rabies, but this is not very common and there are no reported cases where these animals have transmitted the disease to humans.