Feeling cornered on a narrow trail by a raccoon, Maine woman offers up her hand to be bitten. The raccoon naturally obliges, and the woman immediately drowns the hungry varmint in a puddle.

I'm sure she's taken, men.

Rachel Borch, a 21-year-old in Hope, Maine, went for a run in the woods near her home on June 3. She came back barefoot, bleeding and screaming after drowning a rabid raccoon who sunk its teeth into her hand.

"I’ve never killed an animal with my bare hands," Borch told the Daily News. "I’m a vegetarian. It was self-defense.”

Borch left for the run that morning along a familiar, overgrown trail near her house, but not before her brother warned her about a raccoon he'd seen oddly "sulking" in their yard, the Press Herald reported. Sure enough, shortly into her run on the wooded path, Borch and the raging beast met eyes. 

She recalled to the Press Herald a "ferocious-looking raccoon" who charged at her with teeth bared. Within seconds, it stood at her feet. Borch ripped out her earbuds and dropped her phone, which fell into a nearby puddle.

“Imagine the Tasmanian devil,” she told the Daily News.

She couldn't avoid the raccoon, she told the newspaper; the trail was too narrow. So she succumbed to the reality that she would be bitten. The best place, she reasoned, would be her hand: It would leave her relatively mobile and provide her best chance at defense. Borch extended her hands toward the animal. 

It sunk its teeth into her thumb. Borch screamed. The raccoon clawed her arms wildly, its jaw pressed tight. Borch panicked. Then she remembered her phone that sank into the puddle.

Dragging the still-biting animal on her knees toward the water, Borch "pushed its head down into the muck,"  she told the Daily News, until "“its arms sort of of fell to the side, its chest still heaving really slowly.”

Retrieving her bloody thumb from the beast's mouth, she bolted through the gloomy forest toward home.
Borch remembers looking back once to see if the raccoon had started chasing her again.

“It felt like [Stephen King’s] ‘Pet Sematary,’” she said.

Kicking her shoes off because they were soaked, Borch ran the three-quarters of a mile home to her house.

Borch, who was screaming and unsure of how rabies affects humans, remembers thinking, “Oh, God, what if I just start foaming at the mouth and can’t find my way back?”

 Her mother drove her to a medical center.  Her dad and her brother retrieved the dead raccoon.

The raccoon later tested positive for rabies, according to the Daily News, and Borch is receiving the appropriate shots for treatment.

Here's a picture of the vegetarian raccoon killing machine.  All I can offer as advice is that if you ever corner her, and she extends her hands toward you, just run.  Especially if there's a body of water nearby.

Having thought about this a little more, I'll bet what really happened is the trash panda wandered up to her and she reached down to pet it, and that's when the violence started.  The rest is just a made up story to cover for that initial failure of judgement.  Reality bites.

Boy, oh boy.  In this picture it looks like the panda ate off her entire right arm!