Go ahead and read up on what a death due to rabies is like. After that, you'll definitely never neglect to treat a wild animal bite seriously. It's the stuff nightmares are made of.
I had to convince a coworker to go to the ER to have a cat bite looked at, and she ended up spending a couple of days in the ICU with the doctor being clear that delaying treatment another few days would have been fatal.
Knowing that stuff like this happens really makes you appreciate how humanity managed to survive this long. If thrown into the preindustrial past, I would miss temperature control, refrigeration, and the Internet MUCH less than vaccines, antibiotics, and OTC pain relievers.
TL;DR it slowly, and mostly asymptomatically, eats its way up your nerves until it reaches your brain and starts eating that. That's when you start developing significant signs and symptoms, by which point, maybe weeks after exposure and without evident illness in the meantime, you're already dead. There's a treatment protocol—it's grueling and if you live, you'll suffer some amount of permanent disability. And, statistically, you won't live. You're dead.
The course after that is a few weeks of effectively rapid-onset severe dementia. Animals don't get violent and unpredictable because the virus is simply angry-making—they get that way because they stop recognizing once-familiar things and can't remember how they got where they are, and so are constantly fucking terrified, plus their throats are closing up so they can't eat or drink (assuming they could remember to, or how to) and are experiencing dehydration and starvation. That's your near future by the time there are signs of the disease. You're about to dehydrate to death over a period of low-tens of days while becoming increasingly confused and frightened by your situation and by your own loved ones.
Unless a not-too-gruesome death is somehow not concerning to you, knowing that rabies = certain death should be enough, And at least where I grew up, rabies = certain death is taught to kids in first grade, maybe even kindergarten.
Ditto for Tetanus. I always half-heartedly got my Tetanus vaccine when it came time because why not? After learning what happens, I started marking the day on my calendar ten years in advance.
Interestingly, the thoughts on boosters have shifted a lot and the recommendation to receive every ten years may soon be dropped, since the vaccine is considered to have a longer effect than originally thought.
Since Clostridium tetani is anaerobic and in fact can't survive in the presence of oxygen, a lot of the things people suspect could give it to them likely can't. Unless you cut yourself while digging it's pretty unlikely you've been exposed to tetani.
And not to downplay your fears too much, but untreated tetanus is ~7% fatal versus 99.9% with rabies.
For the general population. For those who work on poultry farms they're going to continue recommending regular boosters. Chicken droppings can be a source of the bacteria.
Oxygen is literally toxic to anaerobes in the clostridia class. Which means their endospores are likely to be where the bacteria is.
Like botulism or bacterial gangrene, tetani can survive for short periods (as can humans sans oxygen) but is unlikely to be found in sufficient quantities to cause concern.
Remember that the tetanus vaccine is often combined with a vaccine for diphtheria and whooping cough. You might not need a tetanus vaccine, but you might need the other two. As always, ask your doctor if it doubt.
