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phox phacts

This adorable little babby fox cub wandered into a beauty salon in Tunbridge Wells this week and hid behind a filing cabinet. Mama couldn’t be found and the ickle one was far too little to make it on his own. But the RSPCA took him and will raise and release him.

D’awww, amirite?

But then there was this story. Did you see the one about the Russian scientist who likes to wander around Chernobyl?

Brave woman, interesting story. Worth a read.

At the very end, there’s a video that shows her hiding in her car in terror of what looks like a perfectly healthy, strangely friendly fox in the woods. That’s worth a watch, too.

She explains in the video that friendliness and fearlessness has been found, in foxes at least, to be an early symptom of rabies. Which makes a horrible sense, when you think about it.

Great. Now I’ll never dare to be St Francis.

 

 

 

 

Comments


Comment from QuasiModo
Time: April 30, 2015, 11:45 pm

They’re all cute and stuff until they grow up and eat your chickens…then it’s time to make a fur coat :+)


Comment from Stark Dickflüßig
Time: April 30, 2015, 11:49 pm

That’s why I’m crabby & shy, because I don’t want to get what Ol’ Yeller got. Some poeple just get ichy trigger fingers when you start foamin’ & headin’ towards ’em.


Comment from QuasiModo
Time: April 30, 2015, 11:51 pm

Ol’ Yeller…what were they thinking with that?…it scarred me for life.


Comment from Jeff Gauch
Time: May 1, 2015, 12:34 am

She’s not that brave, she just understands the risks associated with radiation. You can hang out in a 20 microsievert per hour field (and note that that is at ground level. The dose rate at the parts of your body that really matter, thigh bones, gonads, etc. is substantially lower) for months before you start appreciably increasing your cancer risk, and even that would be substantially lower than the risk from smoking a pack of cigarettes.

One of the greatest evils the Left has perpetrated is this irrational fear of radiation and radioactivity.


Comment from Nina
Time: May 1, 2015, 1:08 am

That’s true, Jeff. My son visited from Norway the day after one of my radioiodine treatments, and said that if eating the stuff wasn’t going to kill me, sitting across the room from me for an hour wasn’t going to hurt him.

I did have to carry a form from the NRC with me for a month, though, and wear a RADIOACTIVE bracelet until the half-lives ticked down far enough. And they recommended that I keep out of airports.

🙂


Comment from Jeff Gauch
Time: May 1, 2015, 4:52 am

One day we were doing a routine search survey, where we wander around the shipyard with instruments looking for radioactives gone walkabout, when we passed an office one of the instruments picked something up. Asking around inside we found out that one of the guys working there had had a radioisotope treatment. The instrument I had read 200 counts a minute from across the room. We get very interested whenever that instrument reads 100 counts a minute at half an inch.

Then there was they guy who got his socks and shoes taken from him because his cat has received a radioisotope treatment and ir wound up contaminating his feet – our procedures don’t really account for the idea that someone could be contaminated before they came to work.

My favorite is probably the officer who got kicked out of the Navy because his wife had received a barium enema and we found radioactivity on his…well, let’s just say that Sodom was against the UCMJ at the time.


Comment from Bob
Time: May 1, 2015, 6:08 am

Even if the fox was free of rabies, it likely had fleas and ticks.
You can get nasty sicknesses from those critters.
Also, I recall reading somewhere that hantavirus is endemic at Chernobyl. Since foxes eat rodents they may be exposed to it.
I don’t know about rat –>fox–> human transmission, but I would not want to be the person that proved it.


Comment from Rich Rostrom
Time: May 2, 2015, 5:39 am

Nina @ May 1, 2015, 1:08 am:

My son visited from Norway the day after one of my radioiodine treatments, and said that if eating the stuff wasn’t going to kill me, sitting across the room from me for an hour wasn’t going to hurt him.

He was wrong on both counts.

First, the radioiodine could kill you. It’s far more likely to kill off the cancer that would kill you, but it could kill you on its own too.

Second, just because the radioiodine exposure wasn’t a lethal dose to you doesn’t mean it couldn’t harm him. The risk is very small, but measurable – it could give him cancer. Probably not worth worrying about, but unnecessary risks should be avoided.

That’s why dental technicians step into the next room to activate the X-ray machine. They don’t want even the very small exposure from being beside the machine when it zaps. The risk to the patient from direct exposure is acceptable because it’s only a few times in several years. The cumulative risk to the technician from being in the room for thousands of zaps per year is not.

Having written that, I concur that the paranoia about radiation spread by “environmentalists” is dangerous idiocy.

I’ll also add a story about oversensitive radiation detectors. A nuclear power station installed detectors in the exhaust of the ventilating system for general spaces. A few months later they went off. The plant shut down and they searched for the leak, but they found nothing. This happened several times. Finally someone noticed that it happened only when the wind blew from a particular direction. There was a coal-fired power station a few miles out that way, and coal smoke contains traces of the fossil uranium in the coal. They put detectors in the ventilation intakes – and every time the exhaust detectors tripped, so did the intake detectors.

In other words, the air was “contaminated” before it entered the plant.

Jeff Gauch @ May 1, 2015, 4:52 am

My favorite is probably the officer who got kicked out of the Navy because his wife had received a barium enema and we found radioactivity on his…well, let’s just say that Sodom was against the UCMJ at the time.

Gotta call b.s on this one. There is no radioactive material in a barium enema. Barium is used because it is opaque to X-rays; filling the bowel with barium solution allows the bowel’s form to be precisely imaged.

AFAIK there are no medical treatments in which radioisotopes are administered rectally. Google shows some use of radioactive enemas in diagnosing colitis.

(Google also found a reference to radium enemas, which were A Thing a hundred years ago. Yeesh.)

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