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Thursday, July 11, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com NEWS

In early June, the Humane 
Society 
of 
Huron 
Valley 
noticed “strange” behavior 
starting to occur frequently 
among 
the 
raccoons 
and 
skunks of Washtenaw County. 
The group said they received 
numerous calls from con-
cerned residents and docu-
mented a 45 percent increase 
in sick wildlife being treated 
by their facilities since the 
beginning of the year.
On June 6, HSHV pub-
lished a press release to notify 
the public. In the release, 
HSHV CEO Tanya Hilgendorf 
was quoted in the press release 
saying there was a presumed 
outbreak of distemper and 
parvovirus in the community.
“We don’t want to cause 
alarm, but this gives rise to 
an important reminder to 
keep your pets up to date on 
vaccines and be very careful 
where you go with puppies 
who haven’t yet been fully vac-
cinated and older animals with 
weaker immune systems,” Hil-
gendorf said.
Distemper and parvovi-
rus are not a threat to human 

immune systems, but can be 
fatal for unvaccinated, very 
young or very old animals. 
Though more common in 
dogs, other house pets such 
as cats may contract either 
virus through contact with the 
infected animals, resulting in 
serious gastrointestinal and 
neurological problems.
HSHV 
communications 
director Wendy Welch said 
the release was issued just 
as a reminder for pet owners 
to vaccinate their compan-
ion animals as the diseases in 
question are easily prevent-
able.
“All of our services are to 
keep people with their com-
panion animals and serve the 
animals and people in our 
community,” Welch said.
Since the release, Welch 
said there has been a decrease 
in calls from concerned resi-
dents and an uptick in pet vac-
cinations.
Welch said she has not 
worked on anything similar 
recently, but she and Molly 
Tamulevich, Michigan State 
director for the Humane Soci-
ety of the United States, both 
said they are not uncommon.
“These outbreaks pop up 

time to time … and sometimes 
there’s an increase in report-
ing, especially with areas 
with a really high population 
density, where you might just 
have an increase in reports,” 
Tamulevich said.
Tamulevich, an Ann Arbor 
native, attributes this out-
break and others like it to the 
increase of “urban wildlife,” 
animals who adapt to the city 
infrastructure built around 
them.
“As 
our 
communities 
sometimes encroach into hab-
itats, we sometimes displace 
wildlife, and that wildlife can 
either thrive alongside human 
beings or not thrive alongside 
human beings,” Tamulevich 
said. “Some species — rac-
coons, possums, sometimes 
even coyotes — they do well 
because human beings often 
provide them with intention-
al or unintentional sources of 
food. Wildlife has been exist-
ing in human settlements for 
thousands of years, but in a 
city like Ann Arbor, you have 
healthy populations of squir-
rels, rabbits, raccoons, pos-
sums, and they live alongside 
us and within dense human 
centers.”

Welch agreed and said resi-
dents’ have a responsibility 
to respect the animals living 
among them.
“There’s a whole ‘phenom-
enon’ of urban wildlife, and 
as we develop as humans and 
live closer and closer to wild-
life spaces, we encroach on 
animals,” Welch said. “It’s 
definitely affecting them, and 
we need to take into account 
where they live and how we 
want to live.”
Welch said raccoons and 
skunks are commonly the 
“victims” of diseases, such as 
this spring’s outbreaks of dis-
temper and parvovirus. Addi-
tionally, Welch said spring, 
which is birthing season for 
these animals, is the time of 
the year most susceptible to 
such an outbreak.
Tamulevich advised con-
cerned pet owners to engage 
in 
“common-sense” 
prac-
tices which prevent animal 
encroachment on their prop-
erty. This “preventative main-
tenance” 
includes 
feeding 
animals inside and clearing 
brush.

Rackham student Rima 
Fadlallah and U-M Dear-
born alum Yasmeen Kadouh, 
both Dearborn natives, cre-
ated the podcast “Dearborn 
Girl” to challenge stereo-
types about themselves and 
women in the community 
they call home.
Fadlallah and Kadouh said 
they heard people express 
concern about both leaving 
and staying within their city. 
Some attributed this to a lack 
of spaces for women to speak 
freely among each other and 
nearly everyone they have 
talked to said they shared the 
stereotype of the “Dearborn 
girl.”
“For many in and outside 
Dearborn, the term means 
that the girl is uncivilized, 
loud and obnoxious, some-
one who doesn’t experience 
Arab culture outside of Dear-
born,” Fadlallah said.
In December, with the 
purpose of capturing these 
exchanges, Kadouh and Fad-
lallah filed into the Detroit 
Foundation Hotel in Dear-
born to record a pilot podcast 
episode. The hotel offered 
their audio equipment free of 
cost for a two-hour time slot 
every week. After learning 
how to use the complimen-
tary audio equipment and 
recording their tester, they 
decided to embark on the 
journey of creating a com-
munity driven podcast — an 
attempt to create a space 
for women in Dearborn to 
address their life experienc-
es while reclaiming the term. 
What started as a podcast 
idea has turned into a much 

larger project. “Dearborn 
Girl” expanded to videogra-
phy and has 2,656 followers 
on Instagram after only one 
season of production. Malak 
Wazne, Dearborn filmmak-
er and Henry Ford College 
sophomore, caught wind of 
their project and immedi-
ately wanted to join their 
mission.
“I have always been pas-
sionate about storytelling. 
After Rima and Yasmeen 
interviewed me on the pod-
cast about my film and photo 
career, I knew this project 
was something I wanted to 
be a part of,” Wazne said. 
“Shortly after putting our 
skills and passion together, 
it became more evident that 
‘Dearborn Girl’ was much 
larger than any one individ-
ual.”
After a few recording ses-
sions, Fadlallah and Kadouh 
realized they had enough 
audio to produce a full sea-
son of 10 episodes with extra 
to spill into a second season. 
On May 22, an audience of 
150 attended the Arab Amer-
ican National Museum to 
listen to their debut episode, 
titled #proudlyaDG.
In the first episode, Har-
vard graduate Mariam Jal-
loul spoke of her transition 
from the Ivy League back to 
Dearborn. In 2016, she gave 
the commencement speech 
for her graduating class at 
Harvard, and, while it was 
a significant moment for her 
and her family, she said she 
returned to the Dearborn 
community to typical ques-
tions.

‘U’ student 
makes podcast 
about living 
in Dearborn 
Creators say stereotypes about city, 
women prompted need for show

DESIGN BY KATHRYN HALVERSON

Read more at michigandaily.com

Raccoons spread virus to 
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CATHERINE NOUHAN
Daily Staff Reporter

MELANIE TAYLOR
Summer News Editor

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Vets reccomend vaccinating outdoor animals to prevent virus growth 

