City of Bowling Green offers free drive-thru Rabies clinic

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The city of Bowling Green wants to help you keep your pets safe and is teaming up with Snodgrass Veterinary Medical Center to host a free rabies clinic.
The city’s animal protection division says both state and city laws require dogs, cats, and yes, ferrets be vaccinated against rabies, and for a good reason, the disease can be transferred to humans.

“If you have an outdoor animal, dog or cat that goes outside and maybe comes in contact with wildlife that has the disease, now all of a sudden they’re bringing it into your home and could potentially infect you and your family as well,” says Brad Schargorodski, with the city’s Code Compliance and Animal Protection.

“Elsewhere in the world, there’s up to 60,000 deaths a year from rabies. So because of a robust vaccination program for our pets, it has really cut down on the incidence of any sort of rabies infections in humans and in domesticated pets.”

The free rabies vaccination clinic is at Stockdale’s on Saturday and no registration is required, just drive up with your pets. City officials say the animals must be at least four months old and the vaccine is good for three years.

“This is an incredibly safe vaccine. Very, very low risk of even having a vaccine reaction after that,” says Hannah Thomas with Snodgrass Veterinary Medical Clinic.

Although you may not hear much about rabies these days, the threat is real for communities with unvaccinated pets.

“Just in the last year, there has been one dog in Kentucky that’s tested positive for rabies after exposure to a skunk. There’s also been two horse cases just in the state of Tennessee where horses have been euthanized and later tested positive for rabies. So it is still a very real risk for our pets,” says Thomas.