‘Attack mode’: Rabid fox attacks woman relaxing in backyard

CLEVELAND COUNTY, N.C. — A woman said she fought off a rabid fox after it attacked her outside her home in Cleveland County.

Channel 9’s Ken Lemon spoke with Joann Fite, who believes she may not have been the first person attacked by the rabid animal.

A man doing work at a house nearby said an aggressive fox bit his pant leg Thursday morning. The worker ran away.

Fite believes the same fox snuck up to her five hours later while she was soaking up the sun in the backyard of her home on Padgett Road near Lattimore

“Still in shock,” she said.

“Nothing could have been a match for this fox,” she said. “Like I said, he was in attack mode.”

Pain shot into her arm.

“I felt a chomp on the back of my tricep,” she said.

She sat up and knocked the fox down with a punch.

The fox was tenacious, though.

“(It) immediately jumped up on the other side of my chair, and it was coming right back at me again,” Fite said.

She reached for the only weapon she had.

“I picked the chair up and fended him off like that. Every time I knocked it off, it would come right back at me again,” she said.

At one point, the fox got a firm bite of the chair.

She swung it around in the air until it fell off, and she hit it again.

“I didn’t have time to think,” she told Lemon. “I didn’t have time to make that decision. It was pure adrenaline.”

The health department said the fox tested positive for rabies. It was the seventh confirmed case in the county in 2026.

Fite didn’t wait for confirmation and went to a hospital for treatment the day she got bitten.

It could have been worse, she said.

“I’m just so, so glad that it wasn’t a child,” Fite said.

She said after the attack, her husband picked up that lawn chair.

Health officials told them the fox’s saliva can spread rabies.

He had to get shots as a precaution.

About 100,000 Americans are vaccinated against rabies each year after a potential exposure. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fewer than 10 people die each year.

Bats are responsible for the most human exposures at 35%. Foxes account for 8% of exposures.

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