: Records of rabies diagnosis in cats? Has anyone ever heard of, or made an official diagnosis of Rabies virus in a cat? I'm a veterinarian in KZN South Africa and strangely enough has never heard of an official case.

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According to the US Center for Disease Control,

Cats have represented the majority of rabid domestic animals
since 1992 with the State of Pennsylvania having reported the
largest number of rabid cats (40), followed by Virginia (37).

That survey dates from 2013, but the page has been reviewed this year so I believe it would still be considered current data.

For those who don't know, even with modern treatments rabies is still considered incurable in humans unless treatement begins within 72 hours of exposure and can be agonizingly fatal within 10 days. Some animals can survive it longer, and occasionally even in humans it can lie dormant for months or years. By the time diagnostically useful symptoms appear, it's generally too late. Not something you want to gamble with.

Vaccination against rabies is legally required for both cats and dogs in many places.

(This got me curious about preventative use of the human vaccine. Apparently protective use is currently recommended only for people at higher than usual risk of exposure -- vets or others who work with animals that could have been exposed, and travellers to parts of the world where post-exposure treatment may not be rapidly available. It occurs to me that anyone doing taxidermy might also consider it a good precaution. The main reason for delaying it until exposure seems to be cost rather than risk of adverse reaction; the series of treatments may be anywhere from US00 to over US00 and provides about two years of protection.)

Recommended reading: Berton Rouche, The Incurable Wound, title essay. This one hasn't changed much. (All of Rouche's medical essays are good reading, though some are out of date; he did a great job of explaining things in terms the average scientifically-interested reader could understand.)