There are a few countries in the world which don't have rabies. For some of them, that's
due to isolation and strong quarantine measures, the same way being an island nation helped Britain.
You see, rabies is a particularly nasty disease: it swells your brain, changes your behaviour,
makes you paranoid and delirious and in constant pain, and then it kills you. There's a reason
that in French, it's known as la rage -- the rage. Rabies was terrifying in 19th century
Britain: any bite or scratch from any stray or wild dog -- and there were a lot of those
-- could kill you in a horrible way. It almost certainly wouldn't -- there were actually
only about twelve hundred UK deaths from rabies in that whole century, the risk was actually
really low -- but it terrified Britons.
So there was what we'd now call a War on Rabies. Pet dogs had to be muzzled. Wild and stray
dogs were killed. There was a battle in the press and in public opinion between dog lovers
and dog muzzlers. Rabies was a threat blown out of all proportion -- but those controls
worked. The last case of rabies caused by a British animal was in 1922.
And there is a certain pride in the fact Britain is free of rabies -- the UK does have a similar
virus in a few bats, but since unless you're a professional vet, or Bruce Wayne, the odds
of a bat bite are near-zero. We count ourselves as having wiped it out. But even today, you
will still see scaremongering right-wing tabloid headlines about new rabies threats, and how
foreigners could break through our borders and let it in.
So at most busy harbours in Britain, you will still find a sign like this. It's a reminder
that bringing any animal into Britain on a private plane or a boat is illegal. Not because
there's a significant threat of rabies; even if a rabid dog was smuggled in, the disease
wouldn't spread particularly far, it wouldn't cause an epidemic.
But the reason this sign is there is the same reason Britain's free of rabies: because it's
terrifying, because it's still a specter in the public consciousness, and because being
free of it, just like being an island nation, is part of our national identity.
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