Friday, July 21, 2017

Snake Trapping



We have a few Black Rat Snakes in and out of the yard, and I wish them well and many mice. The song birds lose a few eggs to them every year, and I have no doubt they get the occasional chipmunk or two, but they are always welcome. Less so for the Copperheads which we occasionally get. In truth Copperheads are not likely to kill a dog, even a small Jack Russell. The standard care is a dog-sized dose of benadryl (1 mg per pound of body weight, given 2-3 times a day), and there is not much else you can do but wait for the swelling to go down.

That said, you can try to remove snakes from around the house, and in locations where rattlesnakes are a real problem this seems to me to be good practice. Karen J. posted a link to the above video, which shows how to use a commercial minnow trap to catch small snakes. In Malaysia and the Philippines, they use a much larger net version placed in the drainage ditches of plantations to catch large pythons.

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