If an animal is rabid in the wild, it's on its own. Or possibly the animal will be tested posthumously as part of a rabies survey by the state Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Industry near Harrisburg.
If a wild animal wanders onto your porch and nips your child (and you had it caught, euthanized, decapitated, bagged in plastic and shipped on ice to the Lionville labs at your expense), Kleger & Co. swing into action for free.
Either way, the critter will lose its head, as the fluorescent antibody test for rabies is done with freshly minced brain tissue, stained with a special solution and observed under a powerful microscope.
The well-known decapitation procedure has led to a standing joke at the Exton post office serving Lionville.
"Be careful," postal supervisor Chip Fahrenholtz tells new mail carriers. ''You don't know what's in that box."
One of mankind's oldest and most feared scourges, rabies is a saliva-borne virus that attacks the central nervous system. It enters the body through blood or mucous membrane contact, usually from a scratch or a bite.
Wild animals normally shy away from man. But a rabid animal will act erratically. Instead of being furtive, for example, it might walk right out in daylight. The point of vaccinating domestic animals like dogs and cats, said Kleger, "is to set up a barrier between wildlife and you."
Although no one has died of rabies in Pennsylvania since 1984 - when a Williamsport boy got it from suspected contact with a stray cat - it is monitored with extreme care in Lionville, 365 days a year. If caught in time - whether or not you trap the animal - it can be treated with an expensive series of five shots over 28 days and large doses of hyperimmune gamma globulin. By the time symptoms appear, it almost always is fatal.
