‘Rabies Is A Killer’ Campaign Posters

Please find a collection of six poster pictures from the 5th May 1976 Rabies Awareness Campaign in the UK, using a mesh with many thanks by Yarona at Sims Modeli, so you do not need any stuff packs for this to work – it’s all base game friendly.

Download

To use, download, unzip, and drop the contained folder into your The Sims 3\mods\packages folder and they should show up.

Enjoy!

Don’t have too many nightmares!

The 1976 Rabies Awareness Campaign (better known as the ‘Rabies Is A Killer’ campaign) was possibly the most infamous public information campaign ever mounted by any British governmental department. It was also the furthest reaching in terms of effects.

In 1976, in response to increasing alarming reports from both Customs And Excise of attempts to smuggle animals into the UK to bypass quarantine regulations, and reports that cases of rabies had reached Calais in France, the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries – Dr Gavin Strang – inaugerated a public awareness campaign to remind people in Britain why the draconian measures were in place.

Christchurch MP Robert Adley had first brought the issue to wider public attention by warning it was common for families with yachts living by the English Channel to sail to northern French ports on day trips with their dogs and returning the same day unchecked by officials on either side. He also pointed out that it was British citizens – not foreigners – that were most to blame for any attempted smuggling attempts of animals, calling them ‘selfish, odious, self-righteous and moronic.’

Veterinary expert Colin Kaplan (later to become famous as the man who wiped out smallpox in 1979) also warned Britain needed to take swift action to prevent rabies reentering and ensure local authorities had set plans in place to contain and eradicate any outbreak.

Along with posters, there was a series of TV, radio and cinema adverts (particularly in summer) – including a five minute long public information film for Sunday mornings schedules showing a man dying of rabies in a European hospital.

Every public building, police station, post office, hospital, air and sea port were obliged to put up the new notices, and British consulates across the world were instructed to give the notices given in six different languages to local authorities to use in their own exit points to the UK to remind its nationals of Britain’s stringent quarantine laws and the stiff penalties for anyone caught breaking them – a minimum one year inprisonment and an unlimited fine.

Since a cure had been devised by Louis Pasteur in the 19th Century, only the UK had made any form of concerted attempt to wipe the disease out, doing so successfully by 1902. Rabies had become slowly prevailent in Europe after the Second World War (bar Scandinavia and the Netherlands) as the attitude of most Europeans was containment of outbreaks rather than prevention of a disease that waxed and waned in seven yearly cycles.

The UK had joined the Common Market (the later European Union) in 1973, and other nations – particularly France – took offence at the British attempting to tell them what to post in their own ports (they saw – and still see the British obsession with hydrophobia as sublimated Francophobia). Britain’s strict quarantine laws since 1922 were also a source of resentment with many other nations who saw Britain’s quarantine laws as unnecessarily draconian – even though at that time there was no innoculation against the disease, only a series of highly painful injections into the stomach wall over a fortnight if bitten; and if symptoms had already begun it was too late.

Matters were not helped by a growing xenophobic sentiment in the UK noted abroad by the alarming rise of the far-right National Front and jaded enthusiasm for Britain’s entry into the Common Market as the economy soured. The Sun newspaper was guiltiest of all however for whipping up ‘rabies hysteria’ as part of a circulation war with its main rival the Daily Mirror with a series of lurid scare articles (publicised with TV adverts showing a family dog by the fireside suddenly growling and launching itself at its terrified owner without warning).

In the rising temperature of the hottest summer of the century, Britain appeared in the grip of terror for a disease that encapsulated latent fears that everything outside the isles was out to get us and aimed to do so through Britain’s greatest weakness – our love for our pets (Britain being known as ‘a nation of animal lovers’). Some even accused the British government of whipping up rabies hysteria as a cynical ploy to protect tourism revenues in the face of competition from cheap foreign holidays in sunnier climes.

In 1983, the campaign posters and public information films were replaced by the less lurid ‘Rabies Kills’ campaign, and softened down again later with the ‘Rabies: Don’t Import Disease’ in the 1990s. By this time, better vaccines (both human and animal) had controlled the disease in Europe (which were now taking rabies prevention as seriously as the British, Irish and Dutch): including the crucial creation by the French of a chewy treat dropped as bait for foxes – heavily dosed with a digestible type of rabies vaccine.

By the turn of the century, Britain’s obsession towards ‘the mad death’ had ensured that it had been all but wiped out from much of the European Union, save for a form called Lyssavirus B in bats. By 2001, the Passport For Pets scheme (first proposed in the 1992 General Election by Lord David Sutch – of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party!) allowed animals to travel freely into the UK and across Europe without quarantine restrictions if they could show up to date certification for innoculation against rabies and tapeworm.