Snake bites dog, takes .22 slug on chin

    0
    260

    The hills are alive with the sounds of summer. Songbirds warbling, bees humming, hawks screeching, new leaves rustling in the breeze. And snakes hissing.

    In the past three weeks, I’ve spotted a beautiful big black and white king snake, a tiny red racer and two tan gopher snakes. And four dirt-colored rattlers. The king, the racer and the gophers are still here–the rattlers are toast.

    A dedicated animal control officer once gave me the lecture about the rattlesnakes’ place in the environment, how they keep the rodent population in check. The problem is that our beautiful hillside gardens attract them like magnets. We lure them with water, shade and food, and those beautiful landscape rocks are their living room furniture. Snake sofas. This dedicated herpetologist would capture them from suburban yards, put them in a wooden box and transport them to the wilds of Malibu Canyon, where he would release them–to keep the hiker population in check. Just kidding. They don’t hunt people–too big to swallow whole, snakes can’t chew–and they try to stay out of the way. That hissing sound they make by shaking their tail-tip rattles means, “Back off, Buster, and let me make a strategic retreat. Don’t make me waste my venom on something I can’t eat.”

    Snake will not sneak up on you, but if startled by a hand or a foot or a dog’s nose, its strike is a reflex.

    So it was that early one evening last week, Tucker, our 7-week-old German shorthair puppy, scampered out of sight beneath the lilacs for just a moment. We heard nothing, no hissing, no yelp, but the puppy walked back up on the porch slowly, looking kind of sad. That’s when we saw the two telltale holes, barely a half inch apart, on top of his nose, a tiny drop of blood on each. The bridge of his nose was already beginning to swell.

    We keep a homeopathic remedy, Crotalus Horridus, specifically for rattlesnake bites. Half a dropper (about 10 drops) in the mouth every 10 minutes for the first two hours gives the pup a fighting chance while he is driven to the Kern Animal Emergency Clinic in Bakersfield.

    There he receives antivenin, antibiotics, analgesics, Benedryl (to avert a reaction to the antivenin) and an IV drip with electrolytes. Antivenin is in short supply this year, and while I hoped the clinic would have some, I remember how many dogs we saved without it. Vets are still divided on whether antivenin is indicated–sometimes the reaction can be as bad as the bite–or whether it’s best to use just antibiotics and the rest. The most severe complication is internal bleeding from the anticoagulant in the snake venom.

    This vet says the prognosis is poor: “Small dog, small snake, bad combination.”

    Mature snakes release only enough venom with each strike to immobilize their prey or discourage predators. Young snakes just let go with the full blast. Our best hope is that this young snake had eaten recently, depleting its venom supply.

    While Tucker was in the clinic, I searched for the snake, but it had disappeared in the twilight. Next morning I spied it slithering slowly across the patio toward the water spigot. Time to dash inside for my .22 revolver, which is kept loaded with shot shells.

    I plugged him. Once for Tucker and once more just because. I chopped off its head with a shovel and flushed it down the loo; then I heaved the still-wriggling remains out onto the hillside for the ravens. Bon appetit, birdies.

    Tucker returns from the clinic with the catheter still in his front leg, protected by a stylish blue bandage. The clinic owner, one of my former riding students, has given my daughter a courtesy discount on Tucker’s bill, reducing it to a still hefty $644. Tucker is no longer a free puppy. But he’s made a remarkable recovery. Of all the dogs we’ve had that were bitten: two Labs, one border collie, one Jack Russell and one adult German shorthair (the Queensland heelers were much too smart), Tucker was probably the most vulnerable, and the luckiest.

    Meanwhile, I’m trimming the lilacs, escallonia and roses off the ground and mixing broken wire and pottery shards with the mulch. My regrets to the herpetologist, but I will not be relocating any rattlesnakes (nor brown recluse spiders, for that matter). They’re in my sights and they’re all toast, fodder for the crows.