The New Brunswick government wants to live trap as many raccoons as possible in the next couple weeks, with hopes of preventing the spread of rabies.
“It will assist the government in coming up with ways to more strategically deploy rabies vaccines baits, and will ideally save us money,” says University of New Brunswick professor Joe Nocera.
The province has been distributing oral rabies vaccine baits in southwestern New Brunswick since 2015 to help prevent the spread of rabies, but that’s costing taxpayers $1 million annually.
Over the next two weeks, biologists will live trap as many raccoons and skunks as possible in over 14 locations to get a better estimate of how many there are, so they know how many baits to distribute next year.
“We've never been sure of the number of raccoons in the area,” says provincial rabies co-ordinator Mike Allan. “It's speculation as for the numbers that are out there, and we've got reports of animals being large densities, small densities in the forest area so this study will help us answer those questions.”
Thirty cases of rabies have been discovered in New Brunswick since 2014. Twenty-four of those were in 2015 alone. Three have been discovered so far in 2017.
Researchers say while rabies is bad, raccoons often get a bad reputation.
“In many ways the species is vilified as being … trash pandas. All they're doing is taking advantage of evolution which allows them to avail themselves of resources that, somebody else isn't using,” says Nocera.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Laura Brown.
