OMG Horrible Scary Monster Loose in Kenilworth!

I just went to Ingles. The small grungy Ingles on Haywood road, of course, my local Ingles, notable more for it's large selection of Hispanic delicacies than for it's gourmet aisle: you can search in vain for shallots at the Haywood Road Ingles, but they have bags and bags of peculiar looking candy with Spanish labels and those orange round wheel looking things called pasta duros which I have always wondered about. This is one of the reasons I love (well, not love, exactly. Tolerate. Am kind of fond of.) my Ingles and scorn the large and fancy ones. At any rate, I went to Ingles and did my shopping and fantasized briefly about a pretty good looking man who caught my eye; this fantasy imploded when I saw his cart, which was full of yogurt drinks and weight watchers entrees, sure signs of the married man. But Ingles has nothing to do with out story. Ingles is merely setting the mood, and the mood, gentle reader, was: humdrum and everyday and actually I did pretty well this week money wise and also I bought all this diet-type food like ground turkey, yum, yum.

So I left the Ingles and packed the car and turned it on, which causes the radio to turn on, and the radio personalities were panicking all over the place. The station that was on, I am ashamed to admit, is far from public broadcasting, in fact it has a seriously annoying jingle which doesn't work, since I can't remember the call letters or the numbers, but it's button 6 in my car and it plays the best mix, the best mix of 70s, 80s and today! or something like that. Why were the radio personalities panicking? Had the martians attacked? No, there is apparently a rabid coyote loose in Kenilworth, which is a fairly upscale neighborhood near the hospital. The radio said that people should stay in their homes! And not get out of their cars! And police were on their way! and so on, and so on. I have never heard of a rabid coyote in Asheville before, so my curiousity was piqued, but I can't find any information on this one anywhere on the web, although I did find this lovely site.

This radio hysteria reminded me of the time a couple years ago when I encountered what was almost certainly a rabid skunk at the river park, and, because it was a Sunday morning, I could interest precisely noone at the police station and/or animal control. Note to rabid animals everywhere: attack on the weekend. Or attack in a poor neighborhood; my guess is that rabid animals in West Asheville get considerably less media coverage, maybe 1/4 paragraph in section C if they kill more than 3 people.

I called my daughter and left a message for her to not try to rescue any small yellow dogs today (the restaurant where she works is not that far from Kenilworth) and I called my mother so we could discuss in detail her new phone issues. I mentioned the rabid coyote to her as well. "What's the difference, dear," she said to me, "Between a rabbit coyote and a regular coyote?"

Disclaimer: I am not making light of rabies. I am terrified of rabies; I keep my animals vaccinated and believe fervently that everyone should do the same. In fact I'll probably haul both my animals in for booster shots today or tomorrow just because of this news report. Rabies is a horrible disease, a significant public health threat, and oh so easily controlled that it makes me weep. So if your animals - dogs and cats - are not vaccinated, go & get it done. It's like $12 at the Reach animal hospital on Brevard Road so there's no excuse to let it lapse.