Technician Viviane Brunet kneels next to a trapped raccoon near St-Basile-le-Grand, Qébec on June 11. Quebec wildlife officials have launched a rabies vaccination campaign as an outbreak continues to spread south of Montreal.Roger Lemoyne/The Globe and Mail
They crept north across the border, possibly under cover of darkness.
Once here, they tried to blend in and go about their daily lives. But they were carrying a deadly secret, which they soon unleashed upon their unsuspecting neighbours.
Their arrival has touched off a kind of ground warfare, with foot soldiers deployed across a swath of southern Quebec to beat back the invasion. Their targets are masked and stealthy, but for all their cunning, they also have a weakness. For marshmallows, that is.
Quebec is fighting the largest outbreak of raccoon rabies in its history, with infected animals detected closer than ever to the densely populated area south of Montreal. Though the strain was virtually eradicated from the province for 15 years, border-hopping raccoon migrants from Vermont have brought it back with a vengeance.
In response, the Quebec government has sent out teams of technicians to live-trap and vaccinate thousands of raccoons across the southwestern region of Montérégie, aiming to stop the spread of disease before it reaches the suburbs of Montreal.
“We’re definitely waging a war right now,” said Marianne Gagnier, rabies management co-ordinator for the provincial government. “Animals know no borders.”
One thing to understand about rabies is that it doesn’t always look like rabies.
This spring, Camille Kilsdonk-Gervais spotted a strange-looking raccoon rolling in the grass at the base of a tree near her home in the Montérégie region. It made a few half-hearted attempts to climb the trunk, only to fall back to the ground seconds later, looking for all the world like it had downed one too many tequila shots.
Ms. Kilsdonk-Gervais took several videos of the animal, trying to understand what she was seeing. She thought it might have broken its back.
Eventually, she sent the videos to her mother, Caroline Kilsdonk, who has a doctorate in veterinary medicine. Ms. Kilsdonk told her to report the animal, which was quickly euthanized. It later tested positive for rabies.
“People often think that animals with rabies are always aggressive,” Ms. Kilsdonk said in an interview. “That’s not always the case.”
That raccoon was one of more than 180 cases detected in Quebec in the past 18 months. The virus has moved steadily northward since the first invader was located close to the U.S. border in December, 2024.
“The rate of increase in this situation is particularly high,” David-Martin Milot, director of public health for the region, said in a recent press conference. “So yes, we are surprised.”
To fight the outbreak, the Quebec government began distributing vaccine baits. But officials decided to kick the campaign into high gear this past May with a “trap-vaccinate-release” operation covering 750 square kilometres.
Brunet releases a vaccinated raccoon near St-Basile-le-Grand, Québec on June 11. Quebec is fighting the largest outbreak of raccoon rabies in its history, with infected animals detected closer than ever to the densely-populated area south of Montreal.Roger Lemoyne/The Globe and Mail
Each morning, 25 teams of technicians headed out to check more than 1,200 live traps, often set on the edges of rural properties and baited liberally with marshmallows. After sandwiching the unhappy raccoons into the bottom of the traps, the workers tagged their ears and injected them with a vaccine, then spray-painted a patch of their fur. Their humiliation complete, the animals were set free, beetling off into the undergrowth with surprising speed.
Roughly 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the raccoon population will need to be immunized to stop the spread, Ms. Gagnier said. “We know it will take several years to get there.” Preliminary results suggest more than 2,000 raccoons were vaccinated during the six-week campaign.
Rabies is one of the oldest known viral diseases, and it still captures the imagination. It’s the inspiration for various zombie apocalypses, not to mention Stephen King’s Cujo and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller, the latter of which has broken young hearts since its publication in 1956.
Back then, domestic dogs accounted for most of the animal rabies cases reported in the United States, and the virus caused hundreds of human deaths each year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Rabies has the highest fatality rate of any known infectious disease – once symptoms appear, death is virtually certain.
Thanks to mass vaccination, dog rabies has been all but eliminated in North America, but the disease persists in wild mammals. The most common carriers today are bats, skunks, foxes and, in the U.S., raccoons.
Raccoon rabies first appeared in Florida in the late 1940s, when some unfortunate creature may have picked it up from a skunk or bat. Rabid raccoons spread slowly into neighbouring states for the next 30 years, before they were inadvertently introduced into West Virginia in 1977, a consequence of a years-long practice of transplanting the animals into Appalachia for hunting.
A trapped raccoon that will be vaccinated and released on June 11. More than 180 cases of raccoon rabies have been detected in Quebec in the past 18 months.Roger Lemoyne/The Globe and Mail
From there, the northward march continued. The raccoon rabies variant arrived in Vermont in 1994 and reached Ontario in 1999. Since then, sporadic outbreaks have been detected and eventually eliminated in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.
Quebec saw its first outbreak of raccoon rabies between 2006 and 2009, when 104 cases were detected. A single case was confirmed in 2015, but a vaccination campaign helped push the virus back south of the border.
The eradication was so successful that Quebec stopped its vaccination efforts after 2020. But in 2022, officials in Vermont started seeing an uptick in cases around Burlington, in the northern part of the state. Raccoons in urban areas have so many food sources that it’s harder to get them to eat vaccine baits, leaving the population more susceptible to the virus, said Natalie Kwit, the state public health veterinarian.
The odds of a human contracting rabies from a raccoon are low, since postexposure vaccines can prevent the illness. All recent cases of human rabies in Canada were transmitted from bats, whose bites can go unnoticed, or from exposure outside the country. There have been six reported cases in Canada since 2000, while the last case transmitted from a non-flying animal was in 1967.
Still, it’s a form of migration Quebec would prefer to do without. One day in early June, Édouard Soucy stood watching as a team vaccinated a raccoon on the edge of his backyard in Carignan.
“I don’t know if we’re overly alarmed by the situation,” he said. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry.”