Woman Fights Otter to Save Her Pet Dog
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006
West Boca – If you see a river otter scampering your way, run … and fast. Leah Vanon learned that lesson the hard way. She had never heard of otters attacking animals or people standing by a canal. So when an otter swam toward her, climbed a slope, grabbed her pet yellow Labrador, Jasmine, by its nose and dragged it into the water, she started to scream, yelling for her dog to swim toward the shore.
‘It was attacking her to death,’ said Vanon, who lives in the Mediterrania community west of Boca Raton. ‘It wasn’t going to stop until it killed her.’ Vanon, a mother of 11-year-old twins, was barely able to get the otter’s teeth off the lab’s face. Then it grabbed Vanon’s tiny toy fox terrier, Wiley.
She slid down the bank of the canal and waded into the water. With murky water almost up to her waist, Vanon reached Wiley, 3, and began punching the otter in the face until it let go and retreated. ‘I am glad my children were not here,’ she said. They were attending summer camp.
Vanon often walks her dogs along the mowed bank of the canal near her home on Powerline Road between West Palmetto Park and Glades roads. Around 5 p.m. Tuesday she saw four otters in the water. She stopped to look. ‘I watched them before, but they’ve never been aggressive,’ said Vanon, who has lived along the canal for five years.
She never heard neighbors complain about the otters’ behavior.
Jasmine and Wiley suffered puncture wounds and scratches but didn’t need stitches, said Dr. Nicholas Garrick, who treated them at the VCA Boca Del Mar Animal Hospital. He cleaned their wounds, gave them rabies boosters and put them on antibiotics.
Otters are not known for carrying rabies, a viral disease that affects the nervous system of mammals, but rabies does spread among other warm-blooded animals such as raccoons, skunks, dogs and cats, Garrick said. For Garrick, the pair were his first otter-attack victims. He planned to report the incident to the Palm Beach County Animal Care & Control and the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
Wiley now seems afraid of getting close to the canal, Vanon said. ‘It is abnormal behavior for otters,’ said Wesley Seitz , a nuisance biologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. ‘They are usually shy and playful. They are predators but are not vicious animals.’ Seitz had two cases of rabid otters a few years ago. Otters live year-round in fresh water such as lakes, ponds, canals, rivers and marshes. But they become more visible during the summer, when they breed and take their young out to teach them to look for food, said David Hitzig, executive director of the Busch Wildlife Sanctuary in Jupiter.
Hitzig thinks the otter probably was being territorial and protective of its babies. ‘Maybe the dogs surprised the babies and mom went into defensive mode,’ he said. ‘Otters are curious creatures but never make contact.’
SOURCE: Palm Beach Post
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