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Wait, you can't test an animal for rabies without killing it? Wtf?
The earliest and most distinctive place where rabies expresses itself physically - and the reason that it's so lethal, and its symptoms so memorable - is the central nervous system. If you want to check whether something's brain is full of viral bodies, you pretty much have to get hold of a chunk of its brain.
Couldn't you test saliva? I assume that the virus is present in there if the bites are transmitting the disease? Or maybe cerebrospinal fluid, though that might be hard to sample from a very smol animal.
You could, but the test would be less consistent, and rabies is bad enough that nobody wants to fuck around. If you take the (very unpleasant) vaccine early enough, you can survive, but once symptoms have been expressed it's basically a death sentence, even with the full might of modern medicine. Currently the rate of survival without becoming a permanently bedridden vegetable stands at one. Not one percent, one person.
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