Hello Rattlesnake

Rattler on a friend's porch in the foothills, next to the dog beds, yikes. Removed and dispatched shortly thereafter. Little tyke was about two Barbies long, as we measure rattlesnakes here in Southern California.

Few things concentrate the mind like the approach of a large, venomous snake, as the saying goes, and even a small venomous snake headed in the opposite direction will hold my attention just fine, thanks. Rattlers remind me of the old line [attributed to a "Haitian farmer," so probably coined by a summer intern at Condé Nast] that a dog is a dog except when he is facing you — and then he is Mr. Dog. Well, rattlesnakes are always Mr. Snake. Coming or going, they get nothing but respect from me.

Our local emergency veterinary clinicians see "at least a few" rattlesnake bites each month during snake season. If you live or travel in rattlesnake country, you might want to call around to find out which vets are prepared to handle snakebite, since not all vets keep antivenom on hand. A trainer I know once drove her snake-bitten hunting dog from vet to vet to vet before she finally found a clinic with antivenom. The dog made a full recovery. The trainer probably felt as if she'd aged ten years.

California has been home to some legendary herpetologists and snakebite experts. The latest, and probably the best known, thanks to Animal Planet, is Dr. Sean Bush, Professor of Emergency Medicine at Loma Linda University School of Medicine and on staff in the ER as an emergency physician and envenomation specialist. You can read his articles on rattlesnake bites and moccasin bites [black widows, too] at eMedicine. He doesn't mince words ;~) Here's his page on our local rattlers.

So, you all know what the most important tool is in case of snakebite, right?

A car key.

Forget suction devices: as the doctor says, they just suck. Forget incisions, constriction bands, buckets of ice, bottles of alcohol and all those magic herbal salves the curandera gave your great-grandmother. All they do is make things worse.

1) Put the snakebite victim in the car.

2) Take the car key in your right hand, put the key in the ignition, turn the engine on, and drive carefully to the nearest hospital emergency room [or veterinary ER if, god forbid, your dog has been bitten].

[Edited to add: a cell phone is right up there with the car key.]

Don't waste time trying to catch and kill the snake so that it can be identified. In the first place, most vets aren't herpetologists. In the second place, even if your vet knows his colubrids from his elapids it doesn't matter: the antivenom isn't species-specific. A dog here in the U.S. will get the same antivenom whether he was bitten by a cottonmouth or a southern pacific rattler or a western diamondback or a Mojave "green." So will you. Vets give dogs the same antivenom that ER docs give to human snakebite victims. The doctor will probably administer CroFab, and you can read more about it here and here.

"But what if one of us is bitten by a coral snake?"

You're screwed, basically. Sorry about that.

Historically, if the snake was positively identified as an eastern or Texas coral snake and the victim was asymptomatic, or if signs and symptoms of envenomation were already present, the recommendation was to obtain and immediately administer appropriate antivenom. In the United States, however, as of October 2008, all available stocks of Wyeth's North American Coral Snake Antivenin will have expired, and this country will find itself without a commercially available antivenom. [Source]

However:

Absent an available antivenom, victims can be managed with sound supportive care (as outlined above) with an expectation of excellent outcome as long as airway management and respiratory support are adequate, though ventilator dependence could persist for many days following serious bites.

Whew!

[The truth is, you'd pretty much have to chase a coral snake down and grab him and pry his jaws open and stick your hand in his mouth to make him bite you. Most human victims of snakebite in North America are bitten because they are drunken idiots they've picked the snake up. The rest are unlucky. Two examples from California's handful of snakebite fatalities: an elderly grandmother who sat on a rattlesnake during a family picnic in the San Jacinto mountains; and a San Diego construction worker who mocked his coworkers for scrambling away when they uncovered a rattler at a construction site. "I'll show you wimps how to handle a rattlesnake," he said, or words to that effect. He picked up the snake, it bit him, and he died.]

If I lived in the foothills where B. and her hubby live, or in any other rural area of Southern California, I would look into Red Rock Biologics' rattlesnake vaccine for dogs. UC Davis doesn't recommend it yet, not, I gather, because they've heard bad things about it but because they haven't heard much either way. The best things I've heard about this vaccine come from Jennifer Clark-Ewers, a top hand who works her sheepdogs in southeastern San Diego County. Jennifer wrote the following to Sheepdog-L a few years ago, and I reprint it here with her permission.

I have vaccinated for 3 years and it has saved 4 dogs on my ranch including one this week. Last year I had a small female bit on the inside of the back leg, obviously she pee'd on the snake.. I thought she had injured herself as we always think there will be some giant amount of drama when they are bit, NO in the 4 dogs bit on my property we only knew after the fact. In 2 cases we killed the snakes in the other 2 cases we had no idea they had been bit, of course until the swelling. The legs still turn black and the skin died in the immediate area around the bite, but antibiotics and Benadryl were the only thing the vets suggested because of the vaccine. The vaccine obviously buys you an enormous amount of time since in the case of the "unknown" bites the dogs were crated waiting to go to a vet for some unknown injury; snake bite puncture holes are not exactly easy to find on a fur ridden leg. So anyhow for people that are in the area that has the vaccine available I think you are foolish not to use it. Am I complacent about the rattlesnake bite? Not even, but I am a bit more relaxed. I only have a few dogs that "alarm" me to the fact that there is a rattlesnake in the area... I believe more in the vaccine than the shock collar.

As Jennifer emphasizes, the vaccine gives you extra time and in the case of her dogs, lessened the severity of the symptoms. It isn't a cure-all: I heard from vet techs last year about a dog that had been vaccinated but died following a rattlesnake bite because the owners were away from home and didn't return in time to get the dog to the vet. And with or without a vaccine, rattlesnake bites can cause horrific tissue damage. Trainer and Open handler Amelia Smith has written a gripping account of her famous Price and his battle to survive after a big southern pacific rattler bit him on the face and paw.

[What "big" means:
Rattlers are heavy-bodied snakes. They're not long — a 6-foot rattlesnake is humongous — but they can be mighty hefty. The largest one I've seen in California was a southern pacific as big around the middle as my knee. He was in the basement of the San Bernardino County Museum, back when Bob Sanders kept his live rattlesnakes there and Dee Simpson's Joe - a big, bonny Gila monster - would ride around on your arm like a puppy. That southern pacific had a ginormous rattle going like crazy and you could hear it two floors up — when I first heard him I thought a steam pipe had burst.]

I should mention that a vial of antivenom costs hundreds of dollars, and the cost of treating a dog with multiple vials can easily hit four figures. The local veterinary ER has euthanized dogs at owner request in a few cases where the owner was unable or unwilling to pay for the cost of treatment for poisonous snakebite.

On the phone Jennifer pointed out that it can be impossible, sometimes, for a sheepdog to avoid a snake while the dog is working stock. This is one of the problems I have with aversion training, which is the use of electric collars to teach dogs to avoid snakes. What good will aversion training do when the dog is completely focused on stock? Aversion training might help a dog avoid a snake on a dirt road, but not during an outrun or a gather.

It was late Friday afternoon near beautiful Oak Glen when that rattler at the top of the post had his picture taken. On Sunday - yesterday - another one showed up. Gophers in the new apple orchard... ssssssspread the word...

Good-bye rattlesnake! [Click for bigger.]
DancesWithGuars photographed this magnificent southern pacific rattlesnake crossing a trail in Rancho Sierra Vista.

"But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone."
Emily Dickinson

Related:
Just chilling

Just chilling

Photo by Kai Rösler. Click for big.

An albino morph of Crotalus basiliscus from Mexico, one of the largest rattlesnake species. This individual is at the San Diego Zoo, where it was photographed by Kai Rösler. Yes, Klapperschlange means rattlesnake in German.

See the pit between the nostril and the [icy cold] blue eye?

What makes [members of the subfamily Crotalinae] unique is that they all share a common characteristic: a deep pit [hence the name "pit viper"], or fossa, in the loreal area between the eye and the nostril on either side of the head. These loreal pits are the external openings to a pair of extremely sensitive infrared detecting organs, which in effect give the snakes a sixth sense that helps them to find and perhaps even judge the size of the small warm-blooded prey on which they feed.[3]

The pit organ is complex in structure and is similar to, but much more highly evolved than the thermoreceptive labial pits found in boas and pythons. It is deep and located in a maxillary cavity. The membrane is like an eardrum that divides the pit into two sections of unequal size, with the larger of the two facing forwards and exposed to the environment. The two sections are connected via a narrow tube, or duct, that can be opened or closed by a group of surrounding muscles. By controlling this tube the snake can balance the air pressure on either side of the membrane.[2] The membrane has many nerve endings packed with mitochondria. Succinic dehydrogenase, lactic dehydrogenase, adenosine triphosphate, monoamine oxidase, generalized esterases and acetylcholine esterase have also been found in it.[3] When prey comes into range, infrared radiation falling onto the membrane allows the snake to determine its direction.[2] Having one of these organs on either side of the head produces a stereo effect that indicates distance as well as direction. Experiments have shown that, when deprived of their senses of sight and smell, these snakes can strike accurately at moving objects that are less than 0.2°C warmer than the background.[5] It would seem as though the pit organs work like a primitive pair of eyes, although it is not known whether the snake experiences this sense as a visual image or in some other fashion.[6] Regardless, it is clear that these organs are of great value to a predator that hunts at night. [Source, with footnotes.]

The lifesaver

Roary the Staffordshire bull terrier with three-year-old Ebony Davis.

The genus is Pseudonaja: false cobra. A bit misleading, since the Australian Brown Snake is more dangerous than its Indian cousin Naja. Pseudonaja textilis, the Eastern Brown Snake found in Victoria, is considered the second most toxic land snake in the world.

Roary the ten-year-old Staffy bull didn't know that, of course. But he would have known something was wrong: there was a strange animal; there was Ebony's father, Tim Davis, lunging for his daughter as the snake reared to strike at the child. If fear is a thing dogs can sense, smell, taste, the air in that yard must have been acrid with it.

Roary jumped on the 1.5-metre snake, bit it and swung it clear of Ebony and her father in the backyard of their home.

But the family pet's bravery almost cost its life.

As Roary held on, the snake bit him repeatedly on the flanks and one ear before breaking free and slithering under a shed.

Ebony's father, Tim Davis, 38, said the dog "did a lap of honour around the yard, with his tail on high, and then he went in the house and collapsed".

"As I wiped the venom off his body, his legs gave way and his head came down on the floor," Mr Davis said. "There was no sign of life in him."

Mr Davis put Roary on the front seat of his car and rushed the dog 10km to Kangaroo Flat Veterinary Centre, near his home at Lockwood in central Victoria.

"He was quite still and I kept stopping to breathe some air into his nose, but I was sure he was a goner," Mr Davis said.

"When we got there, the vet told me how expensive the anti-venom was and how slim his chances were with so many bites.

"I said, 'Money doesn't matter; he's saved my little girl's life. Just get on with it'.

And the tough old dog pulled through! "Running in the yard like a puppy," according to a reporter. You can read the whole story here. I heart that photo of Ebony and Roary.

***

And speaking of Staffies:

The Staffordshire Bull Terrier Club has informed us that Michael Vick was shopping SBs to add to his collection. OUCH. So - in case you didn't already guess - Jonny and maybe even a few of our other Vick dogs may be all or part Staffy Bull. If Michael Vick's House of Horrors isn't reminder enough, breeders - PLEASE - screen your friggin' clients and know where you're sending your breeding stock! Your dogs and your breed's future are depending on you.

That word from the folks at Bad Rap, who are seeing lots of Staffordshire bull terriers in shelters these days.

And is that Rachel Ray's sofa on the Bad Rap blog? Jon Stewart's red pillow? The Donald's Hermès-orange bag? We'll know for sure February 29th when Jonny Justice works his charms on a famous New Yorker. [Earlier, if Donna tells all.]

Oh, and the most toxic land snake on the planet? Oxyuranus microlepidotus, the Inland taipan of [where else?] Australia.