The joke hits much funnier when you realize that rabies is not something birds can get, and there is a fairly good chance enterprise is aware of this. Meaning that, depending on how much you ascertain enterprise's awareness of what the elder Akagi is doing, this is, at least, humoring a kid with a dangerous animal and at most sending your rival a can of whoop-ass in the shape of a bald eagle
Akagi-chan is trying to pull a fast one here and Enterprise, ever the wiser, is humoring it. I thought this strip would be another slam-bang punchline but it kind of went over like a fart in church. I think it's partially due to the golden age of medicine we currently live in (I am just recovering from my first toothache today, thanks to Amoxicillin) we don't really fear rabies anymore. And due to this lack of fear, I think the populace as a whole don't understand why rabies is so amazingly evil and awful. I was the same for years, always wondering why classic Looney Tunes characters always freaked the hell out whenever they saw a cartoon dog in the middle of brushing their cartoon dog teeth.
But birds don't get rabies. Unless you count the artificial affliction performed in the 1800s, to which birds simply shrugged off and fully recovered.
