Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Crispy and Rattlesnakes


Last week, our little dog, Bequia... we always call her little dog cuz she was the smallest dog we ever owned. Now we have Toe and he is literally the littlest dog...

Bequia has come to know her nickname "Little Dog", we continue to call her our little dog and people give us weird looks. (we are so used to people giving us weird looks...you have no idea)

Anyway, Bequia, was sick all last week. I pulled half of a mummified vole out of her mouth one day pre-sickness. Maybe she found the rest of it somewhere?

She acted like she felt o.k. only she got us up all hours of the night to go out and do her bid'ness. I felt like we had a newborn baby. I've never had a newborn baby but I've seen parents of newborns at work. They look like the living dead...sleep deprived and not fully functional.

Bequia is fine now and we are VERY relieved to get a full night's sleep. Shew.

We took all the dogs to a rattlesnake clinic last weekend. Gulp.

Electric collars are used. Live, de-fanged rattlesnakes are set outside and the dogs get zapped if they show interest in the snake.

We watched them work the dogs. It was very straight forward and there was no unnecessary shocking or roughness.

I put our dogs through the course. All 3 went directly to the snake to investigate and promptly received a shock just as they touched it.

It was not easy and I would not say it was fun.

However, it was probably no worse than when they accidentally hit our electric fence with 10,000 amps. It's what I kept telling myself anyway.


(is it amps that cause pain and volts that kill? I don't remember but we have 10,000 of whichever kind doesn't kill... or our neighbor Bill woulda been dead long ago... he finds more ways to come into contact with our fence .. I'm beginning to wonder if he LIKES it)

All our dogs are fine, they handled it o.k. and hopefully they will skirt clear around any sort of snake they come across from here on out.

2 comments:

Cheryl said...

Oh my goodness! A mummified vole?!!! Poor thing!

That rattlesnake clinic sounds harrowing, but necessary. Hope they learned it all in one lesson.

Shanster said...

Me too! Yes ... mummified. A little gross pulling something I thought was a stick or rock or something out of her mouth and it had feet and a tail! Ewww.