Folks, there are yarns and then there are yarns.
A 21-year-old woman from the US state of Maine has had to go full Super Saiyan on a rabid raccoon after being attacked by it while out jogging. She didn’t kick it or fling it anywhere. She drowned the goddamned thing with her bare fucking hands.
Rachel Borch recounted the incident to local news mob Village Soup, and the story has since been picked up far and wide.
The story goes that back on June 3rd, Borch was out running on a woodland trail near her house in the town of Hope, which is an extremely ironic name given the content of this story.
Along the trail, she encountered a raccoon that was very obviously aggressive, agitated, and quite rabid. Without hesitation, the animal charged at Borch, teeth-bared. As she herself detailed it:
“I went to my normal stretching spot and started running back and I was having a nice, scenic run with my earbuds in and enjoying nature, when out of nowhere, I see through the underbrush a very ferocious-looking raccoon charging at me with its teeth bared.”
So ok. Put yourself in her shoes. There’s a vicious, possibly rabid raccoon hurtling towards you. What do you do?
Conventional wisdom might suggest winding up the right leg and swinging for the fences like you’re Adam Vinatieri and this is Super Bowl XXXVIII.
‘Course that’s a big risk and on a muddy track you might whiff and find yourself flat on your arse which, in this situation, is sub-ideal.
So after dancing around the animal, Borch formed a plan of attack: Let the dang thing bite.
“There was nothing I could do, it was going to bite me.”
Borch figured that if the animal was indeed going to chomp on her, it might as well be on her hands. So she *bent down and let this extremely aggressive raccoon have at it*.
The animal bit into her thumb and, would you believe, refused to let go. But with her hands down she was at least able to pin the thing down somewhat. But here’s where it goes from weird to nuts.
Realising she probably wouldn’t be able to strangle the animal in that position, Borch instead DRAGGED THE RACCOON OVER TO A DIRTY PUDDLE AND DROWNED THE FUCKING THING WITH HER BARE HANDS.
“There was a few inches of really muddy water on the ground — it was a swampy area of the trail — so I just took all my strength and pushed it into the water.”
After holding the animal’s head underwater in a puddle for what Borch described as “It happened so fast, but also in slow motion,” the raccoon died and released her thumb from its jaws.
Borch then ran just over a kilometre back to her house – ditching her shoes along the way because they were too wet to run in now of fkn course – and was taken to hospital for immediate treatment for possible exposure to rabies and tetanus.
Borch’s father and brother retrieved the raccoon’s corpse from the trail and took it to authorities for testing (it tested positive for rabies).
Her wounds are healing up and she is currently receiving on-going treatment as per the normal rabies vaccine procedure, but Borch remains somewhat aghast at the incident.
“You just can’t predict something like that. I’m still processing it, but that does not happen and that is not a normal thing.”
Lady, you are absolutely right. Letting a rabid raccoon bite you on the thumb and then drowning it in a muddy puddle is not, in any way at all, a normal thing.
Photo: ullstein bild/Getty.
