A Rabid Fox Attacked Her in Her Yard: 'I Had to Do Something'

A woman trying to fend off a rabid fox that was biting her in the leg reached down with one hand to hold shut its mouth and with the other strangled it, the AP reports. "I couldn't do anything else to get it away from me," Tammy DuBois, 52, of Pittsgrove, told NJ.com. "I don't like to kill anything." The attack occurred July 18 shortly after DuBois heard rustling in some bushes while she was walking out to her backyard garden. DuBois says the fox ran out and bit her leg multiple times, puncturing her skin. She tried to escape into her house but couldn't while the animal gnawed on her leg, she says.

"It was biting at my leg, I had to do something." And so she grabbed the animal's snout with one hand and the fox's neck with her other hand, she said. The fox struggled to get free but soon went limp from being choked. DuBois cleaned and bandaged her badly bleeding leg and called her husband, who took her to a hospital, where she began a two-week series of rabies treatments. Animal control officers retrieved the dead fox and sent it to the state for tests, confirming Monday it had rabies. (More foxes stories.)