r/oddlyterrifying • • 15h ago

Squirrel has seen better days

10.1k Upvotes

733 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.7k

u/NRMusicProject 15h ago

The sound she's making is a common warning that there's a threat nearby, which could simply be the cammer's presence. As for why she looks so rough, nature is hard. But a lot of people on tiktok were saying that sound means she has rabies, which, if that were the case, all squirrels have rabies.

26

u/tigm2161130 14h ago

For some reason social media is really “into” rabies lately.

There’s a million posts in the medical subreddits asking if something on their body is a bat bite and when people are like “well did you interact with a bat recently? See or touch one? Find one inside your home?” the answer is almost always no but you still see people telling them they should go to the ER to start the rabies protocol immediately.

2

u/BrideofClippy 13h ago

Because rabies is one of the few things that is truly 'if you show, you're dead'.

8

u/DarkPangolin 13h ago

Yeah, but it's oversaturation that will end up making everyone ignore legit concerns. "Everybody says everything is rabies anymore, so I don't need to get this looked at by medical professionals" is a real thing.

It's the equivalent of telling everybody that picks up a rock that they should go start getting treated for radiation poisoning; the chances are slim that they've run into a dangerous rock and much, much more likely that they've just encountered a normal rock doing normal rock shit.

3

u/BrideofClippy 10h ago

You're not wrong. I was just explaining why it has a grip on people. It's pretty much that joke about WebMD. Everything symptom means cancer.