Hundreds warned about rabid raccoon

MARLBORO, Mass. – The owners of a Maine campground have called at least 400 people to warn them that they may have been exposed to rabies while playing with a fellow camper’s pet raccoon.

Don Bellmore of Marlboro said he let campers at Paradise Campground in Old Orchard Beach play with his raccoon while he stayed there from June 25 to July 1. Some campers let the animal suck their fingers.

He also told officials he let children at his condominium complex and residents at another complex in Natick play with the 7- or 8-week-old animal named Oscar.

“We never intended to put people at risk or at harm,” Bellmore told The MetroWest Daily News. “Unfortunately, we didn’t know.”

It is illegal to keep a wild animal as a pet in Massachusetts, but Marlboro Police Chief Mark Leonard said Bellmore would not face charges.

“You just have to keep your distance from these things,” Leonard said. “Even something as cute and cuddly as a baby raccoon, you never know what they’re harboring. Wild animals are wild.”

The animal was destroyed Friday after showing signs of rabies.

Nobody who may have been exposed has shown signs of the potentially fatal virus, which is carried in the saliva of an infected animal and is usually transmitted by biting.

Kip Temm, an Old Orchard Beach veterinarian, said what happened to the raccoon shows why it’s not safe to take in any wild animal.

“This was just stupidity,” Temm said, referring to the owner adopting the animal as a pet. “It’s against the law to take a [wild] animal in, and against the law to bring an animal across state lines. We’re trying to get people not to take in strays, not to touch wild animals, and to vaccinate their own animals.”

There are generally no more than a few human rabies cases in the United States each year, and the last recorded case in Maine was in the 1930s, said Geoff Beckett of the Maine Bureau of Health.