Did you ever find out about the rabies?
No, they keep redoing the tests, but they can’t find anything. I asked when it will be over, I was given a few answers but at this point I don’t even know if I will get a definite answer.
I mean I still maintain it couldn’t be rabies, because no animal anywhere has ever, ever survived rabies for a fraction of the time that Arrow displayed his stereotypical behaviour for. Rabies kills within days when it becomes symptomatic, maybe 2 weeks at the most. Not over many months. As an animal born from a captive population, bottle raised in isolation, who had been kept in rabies free countries for the last 7 months of his life, having been kept as a solitary animal his whole life, I’m not sure of where he could have realistically contracted it anyway. He didn’t display any symptoms of rabies, he was still a gentle, playful cub up until the end. He had a good appetite, he drank often and kept himself groomed. He was interested in his surroundings and played with his toys. He wanted to sit on my shoulder, climb all over me & sleep inside the jumpers I was wearing. His balance was fine, he moved normally and didn’t seem confused or wobbly. He didn’t drool, no paralysis, he wasn’t aggressive or unusually calm.
I stopped updating here because they came back and killed my dog too, “to be safe”. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let her go into quarantine. I don’t know how to face that part.
And someone found this blog, asked if they could write an article about Arrow, didn’t wait for a reply and wrote it anyway a day later, quoting me both in what they wrote & in the comments, so I decided not to give them anything else to use. I’m sure they’ve lost interest and moved on to the next person grieving their pets so it’s probably fine to say this much now.
My guess is the results will be somewhat inconclusive, as stereotypical behaviour and many purely neurological conditions can’t be tested for after death (rabies would be a virus that causes neurological conditions, not the brain itself suffering from damage or malfunctioning or something wrong with its structure). There may also be a virus of some kind, or perhaps the vaccines were unsuitable for sables & he was also having some kind of suppressed reaction. Of course without testing you can’t rule out something like that just from observing an animal, but after consulting with a lot of people with experience with diseases, mustelids, stereotypical behaviour in exotics in general etc, we call just saw purely mental/ neurological signs of stress. Intelligent, arboreal animals are extremely prone to it, species like tayra & martens are particularly at risk of developing it and not letting it go even when improvements to their care & environment are made. Tayra will actually do cartwheels off the walls all day long. Mink on fur farms suck and nibble on the end of their tails until they become open sores and fall off, mustelids handle stress weirdly. It’s part of why they aren’t popular display animals at zoos, and why Arrow’s quarantine period was possibly harmful to him too. A bare sterile enclosure was what was necessary, but for a sable it’s more harmful than we could have guessed.
In a few years if I import a group of sables & Siberian weasels (my other love!) from Russia I’ll just build my own approved quarantine facility, I’ve spoken with a few importers who’ve done this and it’s definitely preferable even if there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get it approved. But then I would be able to manage them from the moment they arrived and they would have plenty of enrichment the whole way through. Obviously first I need to buy a house with some land covered in forest to build them some kind of monster arboretum enclosures. I’m lucky enough to have since met an importer I trust completely who moves animals for zoos, and a lawyer with a special interest in exotics who runs a sanctuary so between us we could plan this to go smoothly this time. But obviously the expense is going to be immense, and they will just be pets, so it’s not like investing in a breeding facility and expecting it to pay for itself in time through the sale of cubs. It’ll just be like... one tiny human cottage, next some huge zoo grade & sized enclosures. Sounds like my kind of heaven!
Whatever way I’m wired, I don’t get along with people, or I can’t maintain interest in them maybe. It’s just always been like that, I find them distasteful and jarring (sorry people!). Domestic animals have more or less been mentally stunted to stay in a needy baby phase that makes them much more easy going company, compliant and trainable, but it’s a bit like spending all day around kids with no real conversation. They’re very sweet, in 99% of cases they would make most people happier than the reality of caring for a sable, but they don’t “click” with me the same way. I click with mustelids, but can’t face loving another ferret or mink, doomed to live in a broken body, managing health conditions from a young age and expecting a sudden & unpreventable death. So if I could invest in a relationship with an animal spanning 18 - 22 years with that kind of mental capacity, then it’s worth it to me.
Sadly, it would actually be much easier for me to acquire significantly more demanding mustelids that are already within the eu pet trade, like Asian short claw otters, honey badgers, tayra... but even if I wanted those, they really are serious animals that ask a lot more of their keepers than I could give as a private owner. After all, sables weigh less than most cats & have been farmed in captivity for a long time, it’s a very different situation. There are a few zorilla keepers around though, maybe I’ll come across someone breeding those in the meantime. Stinky & bad tempered little gremlins, but I could forgive that!
In the meantime so I don’t crack up from the lack of what I consider to be good company, I’ve decided to begin the process of becoming a zookeeper. It’s a little tricky because you need to find placement before you can begin the apprenticeship through BIAZA, and of course most zoos want you to have the apprenticeship before you apply for a position. But I’ll stick at it and I’m sure something will come through! There’s a few collections in the U.K. with pine martens, and a few zoos across Europe with yellow throated martens so maybe I’ll be lucky & end up at one of those to get my interim fix :’) I almost visited the British Wildlife Centre when I was visiting my sister in the UK a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t face coming eye to eye with any kind of marten again just yet.
So yeah, that’s more or less the rest of that story & probably where I’m headed next. At this point for me, getting the results mostly just means I can finally get my pets ashes back.