Mad Cows, French Foxes and other Rabid Animals in Britain, 1800 to the present

In this article I discuss non-dog rabies in Britain from the 1830s to the present day. I begin with a discussion of the well known story of rabies in urban dogs up to its eradication in 1902. I then widen the lens and take a cross-species perspective to look at how rabies was seen in cats, livestock, horses and deer. With these species, public and scientific interest was less in the disease, as, apart from cats, humans were unlikely to be attacked; rather it was in how the infection changed the animal, exposing the veneer of domestication, even turning herbivores into carnivores. For the twentieth century, I discuss responses to the threat of fox rabies, which spread from eastern to Western Europe in the post-Second World War years, arriving near Channel ports in the 1970s. Finally, I consider responses to the first death from indigenous rabies for 100 years in 2002, after an infected bat bit a conservationist. Subsequent investigations have shown a very low incidence in bat rabies in Britain and a near negligible public health threat; however, this has not inhibited the press from continuing to exhibit, what the New York Times called ‘Britain’s Rabid Obsession’.