"good thing too that little fakker has enough to kill you in a few minutes. im all for snakes and love em but dont want them round the house. they do however keep rodents away. i love catching poisonous snakes too
by hand and a stick of course."
Actually, a rattlesnake bit won't kill you unless you have a very weak heart. What it will do, speaking from experience, is make you sick as s***, give you a major headache, you get a bit shocky, and start tissue rotting around the bite. And all of this if you do manage to get a lot of the venom out. Some of this is dependent on the size of the snake vs the size of the person, too. I was lucky to get bitten by a relatively small (3') snake. If I had been bitten (at 12 years old) by a 6' rattler, it would've been a different story. Since we had over 100 acres of forest and pastures to play on and around, we did a lot of exploring, camping, etc at a pretty early age and learned about how to take care of stuff (at the insistence of my parents) pretty well. It was still a very scary experience.
Almost everyone that worked at Ross Allen had been bitten many times as they milked the snakes and had developed a tolerance for the venom.To my knowledge, there are no snakes in the North American continent that will kill you you in 'minutes', you pretty much have to go to where there are adders and pit vipers to get this and these will do it in considerably less time. These are what you get the 'two step' phrase from as their venom is so bad, you only go a couple of steps before you die.
The most poisonous snake we have here is the coral snake, but you don't have too much problem with this as their teeth are so small they have to chew on you for awhile to break the skin. This is similar to the most poisonous spider being the daddy long legs..it's fangs are to small to penetrate the skin...thankfully. This is followed closely by the Copperhead, but the area that the Copperhead inhabit are pretty small. The most dangerous snake bite in the USA is that of the Cottonmouth and that is due more to the absolute filth in it's mouth more than anything else. People end up getting sicker from the bite than from the venom.
We used to catch these when we were kids in Florida and talk one of our mothers into taking a couple of burlap bags of rattlesnakes and water mocassions down to Ross Allen Snake Institute to sell them. Since he paid something like $1 and inch over 5', we were always going after the biggest ones we could get.
Of course doing this quite a lot and actively looking for poisonous snakes, one of us was going to get tagged at some point. It just happened to be me and it big me in the forearm. I was about 12 years old but knew what to do about a snake bite (old school style: razor blade, suction cup)as did my two buddies that I did the snake hunting with.
Still no fun to surprise one, though, and glad that you didn't get bitten.
We have to be careful at some of the climbing areas we go to, too. Table Mountain in Golden and Shelf Road down by Canyon City are notorious for having major numbers of rather big rattlers sunning themselves, many times right where you are going to be setting up. Since they tend to scare many people away, we just whack them with a big damn stick, then have the area to ourselves...
Here is a picture of me at 5 1/2 (labeled 'Spring 1957) with a 'pet' rat snake. I have another one somewhere, maybe a couple of years older, holding one that hits the ground with my arm extended over my head. We used to get rattlers up by the house, had to swat cottonmouths when we were fishing, and had all sorts of snakes and critters in the house no matter what we did.
Today held a first for me.
Reply W/Quote
yikes
Will the real "daddy-longlegs" please stand up?