Four Rabid Animals in Two Days Send San Marcos Looking for a Vaccine Clinic

A child in Hays County brushed a bat away with a hand this week. That is all the contact it takes. The bat later tested positive for rabies, and the child is now in post-exposure treatment, a course of shots that works only because it started before symptoms did.

That single exposure is the reason San Marcos is now planning a citywide vaccination clinic for pets. The city confirmed four rabid animals in two days this week, an unusually dense cluster for a town of about 70,000, and three of them were found in neighborhoods rather than on the rural edge.

The list reads like a short tour of the city's west side. A skunk on Wild Honeysuckle Way in the Kissing Tree neighborhood. A fox on Franklin Drive in Westover. A fox near Stagecoach Trail. And the bat, which the city places in Hays County without a more specific address. All were reported to the city on Oct. 21 except the Stagecoach Trail fox, confirmed the following day. No human contact was reported in the other three cases.

It follows a rabid fox found Oct. 14 near East Sessom Drive and Pleasant Street, on the Texas State University campus — a week and a few blocks from the rest of it, though the city has not said the cases are connected and there is no way to establish that from the lab results alone.

"It is unusual for wildlife to test positive for rabies," said Shanna O'Brien, the city's Neighborhood Enhancement Director. "We are tracking an increase in incidents across our area." That phrasing is the notable part. Rabies in a skunk or a fox is not news in Texas in the way a hurricane is news — the virus circulates in bats and skunks year-round and the state tests thousands of animals annually — but a run of positives inside a single city in a single week, with a human exposure attached, is the pattern public health departments watch for.

The city's response is a free rabies vaccination clinic for pets. Date, time and location have not been finalized, which is itself a measure of how quickly this came together. Residents who think they or their animals had contact with a rabid animal are being told to seek post-exposure treatment immediately rather than wait for symptoms, because by the time symptoms appear the disease is effectively untreatable. Suspected contact with wildlife goes to San Marcos Animal Services at 512-805-2655.

Texas law requires dogs and cats to be vaccinated against rabies, and San Marcos enforces it by city ordinance as well. For pet owners who are behind on shots, the city points to low-cost vaccination resources on its website — the practical answer for anyone who cannot get into the free clinic once it is scheduled.

There is a quieter second layer to this that matters for pest control and animal-control work in the corridor between Austin and San Antonio. Rabies moves through reservoir species, and the species in this cluster are the ones that live at the boundary between greenbelt and subdivision: foxes working the edges of neighborhoods, skunks under sheds and decks, bats in attics and soffits. Exclusion work on a house — sealing a roofline, screening a gable vent, closing the gap under a shed — is a rabies intervention as much as a pest control one, and animal-control officers in Central Texas have been saying so for years.

The state's own numbers show how routine the testing is and how rarely it comes back positive. In July, the most recent month in the Department of State Health Services' published series, laboratories ran 1,315 animals and returned 52 positives — just under 4 percent — with bats and skunks dominating the positive column. Four positives from one city in two days sits well outside that baseline, which is why the clinic is being organized and why the city used the word "increase" instead of "isolated incidents."

Until the clinic has a date, the guidance is the same advice that has applied in Texas all along: leave wildlife alone, do not handle a sick or oddly behaving animal, keep pets current on vaccinations, and call animal services rather than improvising. The bat in Hays County is the argument for all four.