Snake Bit

Sade with Dale and Kerri /Photograph by Kevin Pieper for Mother Earth News

I have a new theory: All I have to do to ensure one of our Six Pack gets hurt is start a big project.

Tuesday, I was rotating the closet from winter to summer clothes. It was unbearably hot that day; we hit record highs in the 90s, just two days after hitting record lows.

I heard Dale pull into the drive and Sade run off of the deck to greet him. She loves lying in the sun on the deck. About 5 minutes later, he called for me to come outside.

I climbed over the mountain of clothes ready to be packed away and found him standing with a shovel over a snake.

The baby copperhead Dale killed was like this one, with a yellow tip on its tail

“I think this copperhead bit Sade,” he said. “She can hardly walk.” She was lying back on the deck and refused to get up and come to me.

The snake was cut into 3 pieces thanks to Dale and the shovel, but like a horror movie, its head was still striking as best it could at the tip of the shovel. We could even hear its teeth hitting the steel. Creepy.

Dale explained he saw Sade leap off of the deck and then start limping on her way up the drive. She came back to the porch and did the wide circling she does when she sees a snake.

I knew exactly what he was talking about. I witnessed her wide circling for the first time this season earlier that day on our walk when she saw a black snake stretched across the road.

I called the vet, who of course recommended we bring Sade in for a shot of Benadryl and some pain killers.

Although at first we thought it was a copperhead, we couldn’t be sure if it was a young rattler, since its tail looked as if it was trying maybe to grow a rattle.

PetMD recommends a vet visit whenever any venomous snake bites, and I knew that rattlers are especially dangerous, so off to the vet we drove, again. Abbi, as you recall, was hit by a car last month, costing us our second highest vet bill ever paid.

When Chloe got bit by something, we gave her Benadryl and watched her closely, but I didn’t want to chance a rattlesnake bite with Sade.

Although her foot swelled up gigantic by the time we reached the vet’s office (we called her “Pig Foot” for a couple of days because her toes swelled so badly that they looked like hooves instead of dog paws), she is going to be fine. She got a shot, some topical numbing ointment and a week’s worth of antibiotics to head off an abscess where the bite was located.

Dale had put the pieces of the snake in the back of the truck, and the vet identified it as a baby copperhead, which looks somewhat like a rattlesnake when young.

We probably could have given her Benadryl at home and waited it out and not spent the money, but it is so hard to know when a vet visit is needed.

Have you or one of your pets ever been bitten by a venomous snake?