One domestic cat in India put eight people in hospital!

NEWS AND COMMENT - DALAIPETA, INDIA: The Indian news media reports on something astonishing but I don't have a lot of detail to allow a decent analysis but here it is. In a village in India called Dalaipeta, which is towards the north-east coast of the country, it's reported that a domestic cat went on a mad attacking spree at midnight. 

Scared cat fights back. This is not the cat in the story because we don't have pictures but I expect the cat that injured 8 people behaved like the cat illustrated. Picture in public domain.

The cat attacked eight people leaving them with minor injuries requiring medical attention at a hospital in Dalaipeta village. The police officer said that "A mad cat did attack people indiscriminately in Dalaipeta village and seven people require treatment in a nearby hospital whereas one person was admitted in Chinameringi CHC."

They say that the cat went on a biting spree at Saturday midnight. The cat then vanished. One official thought that the cat bit the people out of fear or they had consumed something intoxicating from the forest. They will increase their surveillance of the area to avoid another attack. No one has mentioned rabies which is a possibility and because it has not been mentioned I will ignore that possibility.

Comment: I'm going to have to guess what happened. And I think it's not too difficult actually to guess reasonably that the cause of this domestic cat attack is the behaviour of the people concerned. I suspect it all started off fairly innocent with one person mishandling the cat which provoked him or her to attack defensively. 

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Then his friend stepped in and maybe attacked the cat and so the cat attacked that person as well. Then others became involved and there was a melee and at the centre was this poor cat. The animal must have been terrified and I suspect there was violence on both sides until the cat ran away.

I think that those are the only circumstances under which I would have thought a domestic cat would be attacking eight people unless it was rabid. It is almost impossible to envisage such a scenario. Domestic cats simply do not do this unless heavily provoked. And I am, by the way, making the presumption that this is a domestic cat without further information. I think that, too, is a reasonable supposition because feral cats normally run away from people and this cat got very close, close enough to do some damage.

I suspect, too, that the injured people went to hospital as a precaution but if you get bitten by a cat, even if it is quite a nasty bite, you don't automatically go to Accident & Emergency in your nearest hospital. You watch your wound and wait to see whether an infection develops and if it does you immediately see your doctor for antibiotics which cures it 100% of the time. And you do that promptly.

I've got to deduce, therefore, that it is likely that these people dived into hospital unnecessarily but nobody can criticise them for it because they were taking precautions without knowing more about the potential issues.

Note: We are told that at this time the hospitals are flooded with Covid-19 victims as the pandemic is out of control in India. Attending hospital for a cat bite would be a bad idea under these circumstances.