FOLEY – Baldwin County could become the southern battleground in the national fight to stop raccoon rabies from spreading in the Appalachian Mountains, county and federal officials said.

Under the proposal, county wildlife control officers would work with the United States Department of Agriculture to look for raccoons suspected of having rabies.

The program extends south from Maine at the Canadian border. Baldwin County would become the southern hub of the effort, Justin Reynolds of the United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services National Rabies Management Program said.

“We drop rabies vaccines from aircraft from the Maine-Canadian border, now all the way to Baldwin County, Ala., all the way down the Appalachian Ridge with the goal of stopping the westward expansion of raccoon rabies,” Reynolds said. “The ultimate goal is the elimination of raccoon rabies from the landscape.”

He said that by extending the vaccine program out from a central point near the edge of known cases, officials hope to stop rabies from spreading west.

The biggest key to it is we’ve got folks who do all kind of modeling, and they tell us that the best way to do it is to fan,” Reynolds said. “Instead of marching this zone all the way to the east, pivot and move. The national rabies management program has decided that Baldwin County is going to be the pivot point. We are the westernmost cases of racoon rabies in the United States and so, we feel like this is a pretty big battleground area.”

The USDA does not have enough people to check on all suspected rabies cases, Reynolds said. County animal control officers could pick up living and dead animals suspected of having the disease hold them until they can be retrieved by the USDA, he said.

He said the program would not require the county to check calls about nuisance animals, but only to investigate suspected rabies cases.

“I don’t want you to go trap a racoon out of somebody’s attic or get one out of the McDonald’s dumpster,” Reynolds said. “I’m not asking you to get into the nuisance business. There are people that do that and that takes significant money. I just want the sick ones.”

Residents often do not know whom to call when they encounter a sick animal that they suspect could have rabies, Reynolds said. The Baldwin County Health Department is responsible for investigating cases in which a person is bitten or has had some other kind of contact with an animal suspected of having rabies.

“In my opinion, it’s dangerous for these animals to just walk around in people’s yards and they have to call 15, 20 people,” Reynolds said. “They get bounced around to me, to state wildlife, to the health department, to animal control and everybody’s telling them. ‘You know what? It’s not my job.’ Then they send a game warden out there and it’s not his job either. He’s not very well equipped to deal with the situation. We’re equipped and animal control is equipped to handle these types of things. And I think it’s safer if it is somebody’s obligation to just get these animals away from the public and get them tested to where it betters the entire program.”

Commissioners said they supported the proposal.

“This is something we need and if there’s a way to plug it into the solutions that we don’t currently have, that would be fine, but if we need to use our resources that we do have, we just need a proposal that we can discuss and possibly move forward,” Commission Chairman Joe Davis said.

Commissioner Billie Jean Underwood said many of the people moving into Baldwin County are from more urban areas and do not know what to do, or whom to call, if they encounter a wild animal.

“We have more and more people who are moving here into a rural area and they’re not used to snakes and all that kind of stuff,” Underwood said.

Reynolds said local officers and other residents are better positioned to keep track of reports of animals that might have rabies.

“I don’t want to miss one,” he said. “We need to make sure that we’re putting this bait drop in the right place. So, having as much information as possible is going to be key to that decision being secure.”

He said the program would be a permanent effort.

“I don’t see this as a temporary thing,” Reynolds said. “I see it as an ongoing thing. We’ve been dropping bait in the northeast in the 90s. We’ve been dropping bait in Alabama since 2004. So, I don’t foresee this going away.”