by Bill Dakin
Bill Dakin’s Remy (Brittany)
Imagine walking through a pasture gate behind the barn where it is knee high in grass…. and there it is! Yikes, a rattlesnake! “HERE, HERE, Paisley, get over here!” Too late, she didn’t see or hear it and it’s now a race to the vet. Heaven forbid this actually happens to her.
Well it can happen, it does and it kills. There are two things we can do to give our dogs a chance. The first is to talk to your vet about giving your dogs the Crotalus atrox Toxoid, also known as the rattlesnake vaccine from Red Rock Biologics. The second is bring your dog to a snake avoidance clinic or to an individualized session.
The rattlesnake vaccine is readily available from most rural area vets and is not expensive. The vaccine is derived from venom of the Diamondback Rattlesnake. Antibodies are created by the immune system from exposure to very safe products in the compound. An initial injection of the toxoid is followed by a booster 30 days later. Red Rock Biologics is clear in their literature that it does not provide the same protection from all pit vipers as it does with the Diamondback, but it is thought to provide some protection from other snakes that produce a hemotoxin. It is absolutely essential to treat a pit viper snakebite as a life and death incident. Always take your dog to the vet, even with annual vaccination current. The vaccination may provide additional protection from organ and tissue damage while in transit to the vet and when being evaluated by the clinic staff. I look for any advantage I can give my dog.
The second step we can take to protect our dogs is to enroll in a clinic or personalized training session with a highly experienced trainer specifically qualified with years of snake avoidance training. Training consists of exposing a dog to the snake that has been rendered safe. Copperheads and rattlesnakes, sometimes Cottonmouth Moccasins if available, are used by our trainer. Three senses must be tested to ensure every chance a dog will use the sense available at the time when encountering a snake. Testing is done by training E-collar as aversion training. The dog owner must be positioned out of sight where the dog MUST NOT interpret that the training event was owner initiated. A handler accompanies the trainer. The snakebite is a life or death event, so an unexpected muscle contraction is preferential to a hideous death from the snake bite. Testing is done for each sense individually to be sure to the trainer that each sense was used. Sight, sound, and smell testing will give the dog as much information as possible to make the correct move; to get away from the BAD THING. We train with a professional Brittany trainer with many years of training client dogs and conducting annual clinics in Texas. A very important point; don’t try this at home and consult with only a trainer with a long history of snake avoidance training.
My Brittany, Remy (pictured above,) was bitten many years ago by a copperhead prior to her snake avoidance training. I fret all the time when I think of not offering her these possible protections early on. She lived, despite her bite, which was a blessing!
(Photo credit: Diamondback – By Greg5030 (Own work) [CC BY SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)