Had an opossum in the compost bucket

Yep it's a good thing my dog was up to date on her rabies vaccination and the vet said no worries. For humans that can be scary stuff.

 

WTF, people survive rabies all the time, it's what the vaccine and immunoglobulin is for. You have to get it within a reasonable amount of time. Very few people survive rabies without some sort of medical intervention.

 

Same here. Dang things can eat a weeks worth of cat food in the barn in one nite

 

Here as well. I rescued one from the pool once. Apparently it fell in and couldn't get back out. It must have been swimming around in circles for hours. Got it out with the skimmer and all it did was hiss and growl and attack. Ungrateful POS. LOL. Should have let it drown. They supposedly have very small brains, low survival rates and compensate with large litters.
They raid garbage cans and bags. Not exactly helpful in suburban and urban environments but they seem to be surviving on human waste.

 

If they are new there, you'll get to know them FAST, they can have i believe up the 2 litters a year. Litter, meaning up to a couple a year, plus as many as 20 in a litter. They are not pets, they are pests, if you'll be feeding them, you will be sorry. I trapped 13 last year before i got the mommie. they love to nest under your house. You'll hear them at night squeaking, and digging. I suggest you do not make friends with them, they'll invite their family over and look out! You know how families are, lol.

 

B. Brown,Thanks for the intel. I will keep an eye on things. If they get out of hand I will thin them out.

 

Nope......................not going down that road of discussion...............................

 

Inner cities?

 

Here's how I set my trap so it will go off quickly,by using a shingle or split board. This way, they don't step over the trip pad, when they ''walk the plank'' the second they go up the board, BANG! Gotcha I should add, if you see one, bet you've got at least 6 or more in the area, the more'' they ''come around, the more that comes around.

 

Like chicken....lol....

 

They only have 9 teats, so that is the biggest litter they can have. Babies are born tiny, crawl into pouch to survive, America's only marsupial, like the kangaroo. They are plentiful down here.

 

North American possum have 13 nipples. Litters can be 20 to 30 but usually only 8 or 9 make it. Fewer make it adulthood and fewer live a whole year.

 

I just looked that up and here's what it says,so, i guess they can have a lot more, but, only 6-9 survive?? But, last year, those 13 small one's i trapped, were all the same size. Maybe from 2 different females

'' As they get larger, they will go in and out of the pouch and sometimes ride on the mother's back as she hunts for food. Opossums may give birth to as many as 20 babies in a litter, but fewer than half of them survive. Some never even make it as far as the pouch.

 

Ok.

 

From the article linked above, "In fact, opossums are resistant to rabies."
And from the google machine, "the chance of rabies in an opossum is EXTREMELY RARE. This may have something to do with the opossum's low body temperature (94-97º F) making it difficult for the virus to survive in an opossum's body."
With that said, they're just nasty.

 

Heard that one before...lol

 

Best bait I have found for them, paper plate with peanut butter slathered on it and big marshmellows. The little ones don't seem to attract them, but the big ones, they can't resist. Our barn cats don't seem interested in this bait and very seldom are caught in the trap. Put the plate under the trap so they do less damage to the plate otherwise they tear it up into little sticky pieces.

 

Untrue on both points. There was a big stir a couple of years ago when someone survived rabies - took a lot of medical support, but he/she survived. Prior to that, there were 3 known cases of survival in the USA alone. Is the survival rate good? No, but still not 100% in unvaccinated people.

Which brings me to my next point, if you get bitten or scratched by any animal whose history is unknown, you should go thru rabies treatment as a precaution - which is fairly successful at prevention.

Possums very rarely get rabies, they are naturally immune and their bodies kill the virus, so that is also a fallacy.