Boy, this has been a great Spring for bull snakes. I’ve seen three or four aggressive young ones, but this morning Torso Boy actually stepped on a four-foot matriarch sunning herself awake in plain sight.
The setup couldn’t have been more perfect. I saw the snake in plenty of time, identified the make and model, risk level minimum. A mature bull snake is non-aggressive, not excitable, not venomous, it’s a constrictor that lives on rats and is no threat to a full (chuckle) grown Corgi. It was directly in Laddie’s path. I let it happen.
Sweartagod, Captain Oblivious stepped on the snake. He then sprang straight up stiff-legged, which I didn’t even know Corgis could do, and … went back for a sniff.
So. Poor judgment heaped on dangerous levels of inattentiveness. This dog is never coming off the leash except in the most carefully supervised circumstances. Not really a huge surprise.
Well, since he didn’t have a bad experience with the snake, unless you chastised him severely he didn’t learn anything from the entire episode except what a bull snake smells like and that all “dead branches” are not, in fact, dead branches.
Tune in next week for another exciting episode of Mutual of Omaha’s, er, Joel’s Wild Kingdom.
Maybe he needs close vision glasses? It happens to the older population. Your vet could check him out.
He then sprang straight up stiff-legged
Omg that image made me laugh. Wish you’d gotten a video.
The snake didn’t object? That’s actually sort of a shame. It could have been a great lesson for TB.
The snake objected, but that took the form of rapid escape rather than coiling up and striking. Which is what the babies often do for some reason.
Last year I came upon a small bull snake while cleaning out Ian’s powershed. It’s dark in there, I couldn’t see it clearly enough to know that it was anything but a diamond-patterned snake coiled up and shaking its tail (they do that sometimes) and so I killed it with my floor scraper instead of shooing it toward the door which is what I would have done if it had behaved differently.
You saw it coming and didn’t take any video? Shame on you… :^)
Didn’t see it coming quite that far in advance. 🙂
I guess there’s no such thing as “the short bus for dogs” because those never make it to school age in the first place.
You might need to make that leash quite a bit shorter….(do they make holsters for Corgis?)
Thankfully here where I am my chances of running into a venomous snake are extremely small. Not entirely non-existent, but very very small. Both of my dogs are normally pretty blase about snakes, though the smaller dog (35lbs) will occasionally try to treat them as prey. But last week a garter snake managed to scare the hell out of said smaller dog. I didn’t see the whole thing, so I’m not entirely sure of the sequence of events, but he lunged backwards to the end of the leash and I caught a glimpse of the snake moving away. Ever since that dog has had to JUMP over ANYTHING that might be a snake in the grass. Including random bits of brown grass. Which isn’t quite the ideal reaction either.
Our current Fido , is an overly large male Maltese all of fifteen lbs.
He like your Corgi , is obliviously naive to most everything. Thinks all animals and people are his best buddy. Other day he got too close to one of the hens. That chicken came at that little dog , as if it were a fighting cock lol. He gives all the chickens a wide berth now…he is a pussy.
Our previous dog was also a Maltese, a female all of six pounds. Now she had the heart of a lion and feared no beast. With snakes , she was a ferocious little mongoose and flat kill any and all in the area. All other dogs were her mortal enemies…she once charged a fully grown Rottweiler , ran right up to him and latched onto that poor dogs nose with her needle sharp fangs as if she were a pitbull. Soon as that Rotty shook the white fluff ball off his nose, he turned tail and ran from the little white demon dog.
We always thought she’d end up deceased young from such actions. Yet lived to a ripe old age of fifteen. After living and traveling many years and several thousand miles on our sailboat.