I would probably take him to the vet but it looks like he survived the bite and is getting better. We had tiny kittens bitten by copperheads years ago and the part bit swelled greatly. Those swollen parts gradually went down. In those days there was no money for vets. Since my current pets are worth a million each, I rush to the vet with every crisis. I go into mourning if I lose one.

Do you have some way to take his temperature? I don't know what a dog's temperature should be but I think you could research that. If the bump is infected that could be a threat.
edit - Emergency treatment is much more expensive than a visit to the vet so before the weekend evaluate how he is acting. Read what Dawn and others said in the thread about cats that I just bumped.

This post was edited by helenh on Thu, Mar 14, 13 at 13:27

George, Did you see the copperhead yourself? I'm sort of shocked they were out as early as last week. I don't usually see copperheads until April.

Often, when a cat is bitten by a copperhead, it will lay around fairly lifeless for a couple of weeks....won't eat, will barely drink water, etc. Eventually they recover....the ones that are going to die seem to die right away.

With dogs, we mostly have rattlesnake encounters not copperhead encounters, but the rattlesnake bites do involve a lot of swelling. The swelling can be dangerous in several ways....if it is on the head, snout or throat, if enough swelling occurs, the animal may have trouble breathing. If the swelling is on a limb, it can be a problem if it interferes with their blood circulation. Our dogs usually bounce back more quickly than the cats do, maybe because our dogs are large, like yours, so the venom doesn't affect them as much as it does a smaller animal.

I am not sure if the lump you describe is ordinary swelling or an infection at the site of the fang marks. Can you see the fang marks? Did it swell up right away....within a few hours or is this secondary swelling that developed later? If it did develop later, I'd be worried the site of the bite might have a secondary bacterial infection.

We have a wonderful vet of many year's experience who is a real sweetheart and a very talented vet. He stays perfectly calm and doesn't get at all excited about a snakebit pet while I'm a bundle of nerves. If needed, the vet will put an animal on an IV to flush the venom through its system, but that is rare. He usually just examines the animal, says "either it will make it or it won't" and sends us home. When one cat was bitten a second time he had me bring her in because he said that often an animal that survives the first snakebite will not survive the second. I usually just call his office and tell him what size the dog or cat is, what sort of snake bit it, if known, and how the animal is responding. He decides if he thinks I should bring in the pet or not. I trust his judgement. Spots, who is a cranky old cat and, thus, too mean to die, survived the second bite as well as the first, and then retired indoors to be the cat in charge of guarding the sofa. She doesn't venture outdoors much any more.

Based on our experience with neighbor's dogs being bitten and with our own, if your dog made it through the first few hours, he likely will be fine.

I'll preface this by saying that people and pets do not necessarily react the same way, but when a friend of ours was bitten on her ankle by a copperhead, the folks at the hospital put her on an IV to flush the venom through her system and kept her all night....then, she had so much swelling in her leg that she spent about a month in a wheelchair because she had to keep that swollen limb elevated. She had a pretty serious bite....got the copper colored rash and the whole 9 yards.

If you have an established relationship with a vet, I bet you could call the office and tell them what you told us and let them decide if you should bring in the pet or not.

I was such a city slicker when we moved here that I just automatically assumed they'd give a dog or cat antivenin. Ha! As if! They don't even give it to people if they can avoid it.

I hope your dog is going to be okay.

Dawn

Hello George.

We live on a ridge with the local monicker of "Copperhead Hill". We've had multiple dogs be bitten by copperheads. They all recovered. A couple were even bitten on the snout. They look miserable, and I'm sure felt miserable, but they recovered after a week or two. My advice would be make sure they have ready access to food and water. It sounds like your dog is already on the road of recovery since it is up and getting around. If he is like our dogs, he will not likely be bitten again. It makes them very wary of copperheads. If there are copperheads around your house or garden, pay close attention when your dogs suddenly stop, looking and smelling toward something on the ground. I've found more than one copperhead this way. One was in my backyard a few yards from the back door. I've made it a routine in the spring to go out with a spotlight and a machete at night and hunt them around the yard and the garden. They stand out at night when you shine a flashlight on them.

A point of caution for those living in copperhead country, they like living in potato patches. I've planted 450 pounds of seed potatoes, (way too much fun to want to do it more than once a year), and plan on patrolling the plants quite heavily. I've found them in the potatoes too many times. But, then again, we live on Copperhead Hill.

Scott, I've never seen a copperhead in my potato patch. I guess maybe I'd better watch more closely. We do have a turtle in the potatoes every year, but it appeared he or she eats potato bugs because once the turtle shows up, the CPBs are gone.

Here, the copperheads like to lie in blackberry patches.

We had a Rottweiler mix bitten on the snout by a timber rattler once. He got all glassy eyed, was swelling at the site of the bite and was having trouble breathing. It was just awful. I gave him Benadryl (the liquid children's kind shot into his mouth with a syringe) and within minutes the swelling, glassy eyes and trouble breathing went away. For the next four years, every time we went past the area where he was bitten, he walked way, way, way around that specific area. I think 4 years is longer than I'd remember something like that.

Dawn

Well, he's been improving, though, so slowly, that sometimes I have wondered. That's why I wrote here.

No, I didn't see the snake. I've even wondered if, perhaps, he broke the bone instead. However, every time I've examined the site, I have seen that the joint functions normally, albeit, under all that swelling. The swelling has lent the appearance of crookedness. But yesterday, when I got home from work, I examined him once again, and still, it appeared to me to be swollen. The swelling continues to slowly subside. Yesterday afternoon he was using the leg a bit more. I've seen him support his weight on it. But it appears to hurt enough that he prefers not to.

It if was a snake, I only assume that it was a copperhead. I assume for two reasons, though there is room for error.

1) I've seen copperheads in my garden at this time of year. One time, right about now, I remember having one snatch a rabbit, right from under my nose, when I was on my hands and knees, weeding. I have never actually seen a rattlesnake on my property. My daughters have heard them in the brush, when they go riding. But not on our place.

2) I assumed that it would have been worse if it had been a rattlesnake.

The dog went missing for about half a day before showing up with this problem. So, I suspect it took him that long to get himself together enough to come home.

All things considered equal, I'd have taken him right to the vet. I did call my son, who is a vet in Seattle. However, we've been really scraping lately. Someone at work asked, "Why don't you take him to the vet?" Well, today is pay day. I could. But unless it was really really cheap, that would easily blow 1/4 of my paycheck (Not that the fee would be that high. The check is pretty small.).

Okay, I'll keep you all posted. I am encouraged with his progress.

George

You have to consider your circumstances. Humans come first. Some vet offices do charge too much and try to sell things you don't need. They do have payment plans that you can arrange for if you just have to go. You might call around and see if there is anything available for people who can't afford animal care.

Will the dog let you look at the sore place. When my dog gets thorns in his toes or a cut toe, he will not let me help him at all or even look to see what the problem is. At the vets they sometimes shave the area and you can see discoloration. I am not talking about snake bite. My animals get grass seeds that make big infected areas. When they shave around the area you can see where the trouble is because the infected area looks kind of pink purplish.

Could you have someone with a camera phone send a bunch of pictures to your son? Where I live cell phones don't work but I know people with smart phones who can take great pictures and send them with their phones.

Thank you Helen. Those are some really good suggestions!

George

Well, went out on copperhead patrol this evening. Killed one about a foot and a half just about to head into one of my potato patches.

Those of you who live in poisonous snake country keep an eye out. A nice strong flashlight or spotlight and a machete or shovel makes for an exciting evening, and a safer yard and garden.

I want to point out that I do this around my house and gardens to keep my family safe. These snakes should be left alone when they are out in the woods and fields away from people. They are an important part of the ecosystem.

Macmex, how's your dog doing?

My Weimaraner was bit on the face while we were quail hunting between Perkins and Stillwater a few years back. She spent about a month at the vet clinic and it cost several hundred dollars to fix the issue. Apparently she had an allergic reaction to the venom. Any other dog I would have had put down but, when you've already got a couple thousand in a dog's training, you'd better save that dog ha ha.

most everyone around here will give benadryl. it seems to really get the swelling down fast.

Well, it's only since this last Friday that I've considered that Guerrero, my dog, is out of the woods. It's a long and complicated story. I thought it was a snake bite. But it turns out that he had broken his metatarsal, right on the growth plate.

Here's what I can put together. The first weekend on February I took my daughter to Texas for an orthodontic appointment. That was an overnight trip, and my wife told me that a cougar made an appearance in the woods behind our house. Actually, she didn't see it. She heard it, screaming like a woman in distress. Guerrero ran out there, leaping over fences, to get to it. The next thing she knew, she heard Guerrero yelping in distress. Bravo, our older Anatolian ran out and, together they chased the cat across the neighbor's field.

When I got home the next day, I observed no damage to Guerrero. Yet, he didn't seem himself. For the next three days he wouldn't get up to eat. I had to take his dish to him. But then, he started getting up. Within a week I started noticing swelling in that leg/foot. Within two weeks he was using the foot normally. But it swelled. By the middle of March I was getting concerned, because the swelling wasn't going away. I forget when, but I eventually broke down and took him to our vet.

The vet told me that he had fractured the metatarsal on the growth plate. He said that it had already knit, but that it was likely going to grow crookedly. There is a surgery they could do. But it would be very expensive and he seldom sees success with such surgery on working dogs. We could try putting a brace on him. But he didn't suggest it strongly, as these dogs are so hard to keep quiet. He did suggest that we pen him and keep him quiet for four weeks.

My family made him a brace and tried to keep it from going crooked. I didn't pen him, hoping he would moderate his activities. Well, one morning I went out to do chores. I found him and Bravo galloping across our pasture, jumping fences and the creek. Guerrero's brace was off and HIS LEG WAS FLOPPING! He had re-broken it, and THE FOOL was running on it as if it were nothing!

So, we put the brace back on him and penned him. For several weeks we struggled with the brace, as he would tear it off at every opportunity. It took three of us to put it on him. Finally, after one episode when he dragged all three of us around the back yard and I ended up falling on his broken leg, we took the vet's advice, stopped using a brace, and just kept him penned. The vet told us, that from the start, he didn't hold out much hope that the dog would keep his leg. He was fairly certain he would lose it. This was the worst kind of fracture possible.

The bone caused wounds to the skin and it got infected. We had to treat him with antibiotics for weeks. But eventually, he started to heal. His front leg is crooked. But I am delighted that he seems to run and play just fine. We only let him out a few days ago. The wounds have healed and the bone seems strong.

Now, was it the cougar or was it a car? I believe either was possible. We know he had an encounter with a cougar. I did find a deep grooved scar, running down his back (hidden under all that fur). But I am suspecting it is more likely the result of tangling with a car.

We've had dog/cougar encounters, increasingly, in our area. I've seen photos of several of the dogs, coming out the other end. They were REALLY messed up. Guerrero wasn't a crisscrossed mess of cuts.

Anyway, I'm glad he's back on watch.

George

Dawn, snakes seem to be out early this year around here even with the cooler weather which really surprises me. Week before last my daughter in law opened her door to a copperhead on her front porch, right by the door. She snapped a pic of it with her. Phone and showed me and it was sure enough a copperhead. Ive been extra careful since then and carry my little 22 with me when roaming the property.

You can give your dog benadryl but please dont give him any other OTC meds as they can kill your pet. Most OTCs are bad for animals, benadryl is one of the few that are ok to give. I agree with the other poster, if you can, try and shave the affected are to get a look at the skin, if it is turning black it is a bad sign. I have a half pyranese and half anatoli, and they are precious dogs. I really hope yours pulls through ok.

Good luck

Emma

Edit: i didnt notice the date of the start of this thread........ Glad your dog is ok.

This post was edited by Erod1 on Tue, May 14, 13 at 14:34

Scott, I had a snake in my potato patch last week but it was "only" a chicken snake. We shot it anyway since our hens are setting on eggs and we don't want to lose any chicks to snakes. Been there. Done that. We don't tolerate snakes of any sort in the yard, garden areas or around structures, though they are allowed to exist and roam as they choose on the rest of our acreage. Our potato plants are tall and lush and it is very cool and shady underneath them so I suspect this wasn't the only snake we'll find in there this year. Last night there was a snake in the poppy patch in the corner of the garden while I was deadheading poppies but it headed for the fence to crawl out of the garden and I just let it leave.

I think it is going to be a bad snake year. I have seen more snakes in the last 2 weeks than in the previous 2 years combined.

George, I am glad that your dog is doing well now. It sure has been a long road to recovery.

Dawn

So glad your doggie was ok!! Our neighbor's dog got bit and died last summer from a snake bite. But ya'll are creeping me out with all this snake talk. I have never not lived in the city, and since we live by water, I am sure I am going to see my fair share. I have already found 3 this year alone, which doesn't make for a fun time when your deathly afraid of them! I wouldn't even know what to do if the kids, or the dogs or I got bit by one. Call 911 or the vet I guess.

And cougars? Are you serious? I saw where there was a baby bear found on the NSU campus a few weeks ago! I didn't even know bears lived in Oklahoma!

Bre,

The most important thing if a human or pet gets bitten by a snake is to stay calm. Getting excited raises your heart rate and if your heart beats faster, the venom can circulate through your system more quickly. Unfortunately, when a dog is bitten, it usually freaks out and runs, which is the wrong thing to do. I try to leash a dog that has been bitten immediately so it can be taken to a quiet location where you can get it to lie down and be still and quiet. Yes, of course you should call 9-1-1 if anyone is bitten by a snake, or your vet if an animal is bitten.

If you can safely do so, kill or catch the snake so you'll know exactly what kind of snake bit the person or animal. This is especially important when humans are bitten because it can assist the medical personnel in deciding whether antivenin is needed.

Most of the snakes you see likely will be non-venomous, but I'll link a page for you that has photos of snakes commonly found in OK. In my part of the state, we see copperheads and timber rattlers more than any other venomous snakes, though we also occasionally have diamondback rattlesnakes and pygmy rattlers. In and near water we see water moccasins a lot. In fact, this year we are in the process of taking out our decorative water garden/lily pond and filling it in with soil. I love the lily pond, but ever since the drought of 2008, as area ponds and creeks have dried up and sometimes now stay dry almost year-round, the water moccasins have moved to our lily pond. Since that pond sits directly between the house and the detached garage, the only good decision is to take it out so we won't have to deal with water moccasins right there in the back yard.

Our cats tend go get bitten more often by copperheads, which like to lie on the shady edges of the woodland where the woodland meets the grassland, but our dogs usually get bitten by timber rattlers. In our neighborhood, I know more people who have been bitten by copperheads than rattlers, for whatever that is worth.

I learned the hard way long ago that if I see a snake and leave it to run inside and get a gun, the snake will be gone when I come back. So now, if I am home alone and didn't bring out a gun with me, I will call a friend who lives nearby and he rushes right over and kills the snake (or sometimes rabid skunks). Looking back, I realize how silly it was for me to think the snake would just lie there and wait for me to get a gun and come back and shoot it, but I was a city girl when I moved here....and about one billion snakes, a few dozen skunks, and several cougar encounters (rare, but they do occur) haven't turned me into a full-fledged country woman yet. The country women I know who grew up here are a lot braver than me. A lot of them just grab a sharp hoe and chop up copperheads when they find them in their garden, but I just can't get close enough to even a little copperhead to do that. You may find that you smell an odd copper smell before you see a coppperhead. I never noticed that for the longest time, until suddenly I did. I guess my nose just wasn't picking up on the copper smell at first, but eventually I did start to smell it sometimes before I saw a copperhead.

Cougars? Yes. I heard them for years before I saw one. My first encounter was when I was outside calling our cat, Emmitt Smith, to come inside. It was well after dark---between 9 and 10 pm on a winter night, and the cougar roared at me in the darkness. Its scream is just blood-curdling, starting out more like a normal animal sound but ending in what sounds exactly like a woman screaming. As one of my friends likes to say about scary things "it scared the fool out of me". lol Emmitt Smith (the cat, not the retired NFL football player) didn't come home for four days after that and when he did, a big chunk of the skin on his back was missing. He still has a scar, though we don't know what grabbed him and took out a piece of his hide.

I had heard cougars screaming down at the river for several years, but never had one close by like that for the first couple of years. The next day, some neighbors who lived 3/4s of a mile up the road from our house stopped by to check on me. They said they heard the cougar the night before and thought it was close to us. It amazed me that they heard it too.

Other than a couple of sightings of cougars crossing a nearby field, nothing happened for a long time. Then, in one summer, six weeks apart (and it may have been 2008) I had young cougars visit the yard near my veggie garden. The first one was standing right by the garden gate, and I saw it from about 60 or 70' away. Of course, by the time I got back outside with two men and two guns, it was gone. The second time, I had just come out of the garden gate at the west end of the garden and the cougar was walking alongside the east garden fence.

Since then, the cougars have been seen by our neighbors on either side, but not by me.

Keep in mind that we live in the bend of the river, and there is lots of wildlife management land along the river. It seems likely to me they pass through here occasionally going from one part of the river to another.

Until I heard them and saw them, I had a hard time believing they were here, but every person that lives here and has lived here for long has encountered them in one way or another. It is not something that happens often, but when it happens, you never forget it. For the longest time, one of my old farmer neighbors was just extremely nervous about my safety when I was out working in the woods clearing brush and invasive plants. He'd say repeatedly "you be careful, you always need to carry a gun". I mean, if I saw him every day, he said that every day. I really didn't understand why until the cougar encounters occurred and then I finally got it.

If you do not have wild, open land near you or if you do not live close to a lot of undeveloped land, you might never see a cougar, but you may see coyotes and bobcats. I had a problem with bobcats getting in my garden and just sitting there (presumably hunting) until we raised the height of the fence to 8'.

We have tons of deer in our part of the county, and I believe that attracts the cougars too.

George will have to tell you what sort of land is around him, but there is some reason they're seeing more cougars there too.

The last time my next-door neighbor saw a cougar, it was in our front yard near my garden. I wasn't happy to hear about that one, but at least I wasn't in the garden at the same time!

I have seen so much more wildlife here in OK than I ever imagined I would, and so much of it was cool stuff---like ring-tailed cats and golden eagles---that I was excited to see. The cougars? I hope I never see one again, and by never, I mean never, never, never, never, never. The wild pigs scare me more than the cougars because they are a lot more common here. The snakes are scarey because they are so abundant.

The best advice I ever received about avoiding snakes was to never, ever put your hand into an area you cannot see clearly. For example, if weeding potatoes when they are thick and crowded together and you cannot see the ground underneath them, use a stick or shovel or rake to move the foliage around so you can see for yourself that no snakes are in there before you reach in to pull a weed. Is it irritating to have to take the extra time to check the area for snakes before you start working there? Yes it is, but it is better to be safe than sorry. If I have to pick up something....let's say a board or a flat rock....that is lying on the ground, I lift it with a hoe or strong stake (I often carry a 3' or 4' long metal fence post as my snake stick) to make sure there isn't a snake or scorpion under that item before I pick it up. Finally, watch your feet. The first few times I 'saw' a snake, I generally saw them about the time that I was about to step on them. The first time it was a mother copperhead with a bunch of babies traveling across a pasture and my teenaged son and I stepped right into the middle of them. Another time, I walked right down my garden path and apparently stepped directly over a rattlesnake curled up in the pathway. To this day, I have to idea why it didn't strike me....I didn't know it was there until I already had walked past it and my son said "mom, don't move". These really are not the sort of memories I wanted to have left from his teenaged years.....but they're the ones I have. He also started to get out of his car here at the house one night when he still was in college and stepped right on a copperhead before quickly pulling his leg back into the car and hollering for one of us (we were sitting outside chatting with friends) to shoot the snake. So far, as you can see, all our wildlife encounters have happy endings. I feel like we've been very lucky in that regard. I have trained myself to always watch the ground ahead of my feet as I am walking, so much so that nowadays I even catch myself watching the ground around my feet in some silly locations.....like a big city mall parking lot where I probably don't have to be worried about snakes. Still, it is a good habit to develop if you live in a snakey area.

Our vet advises giving Benadryl when a pet is bitten by a snake on a paw where swelling could quickly cut off the blood circulation to the end of the limb or if the animal is bitten on the neck or head. Other than immediately giving the Benadryl, I don't do anything else without clearing it with the vet first.

You're not in southern OK, are you? Because if you are, you should know there are occasional sightings of alligators, particularly near major riverways....but also in farm ponds, commonly called stock tanks here.

Dawn

Okiedawn, we have chickens too. Any chicken snakes nearby get the machete treatment as well. We had a grown chicken killed by one a year or two ago. Squeezed it like a boa constricter until it died. It was a big snake but there was absolutely no way it was going to be able to eat that chicken.

Ya'll be careful killing snakes with guns. A couple of years ago a little boy was killed in Noble, OK when two cops shot a snake in a tree. They should have known better. Often there are better ways to kill snakes than using a gun. (Please note that I am not against guns or gun ownership.) Also note that if I came across a very large rattler I probably would opt for the gun and not try to use my machete. I believe there is a very big difference between the lethality of a rattler and that of a copperhead. And some rattlers get very big. Fortunately I have not seen any rattlers around my place. But, if you are extremely fearful of snakes and need to use a gun be absolutely sure, absolutely, what is behind what you are shooting at. Make sure there is an appropriate backstop, and one which will not ricochet the bullet.

George, I'm glad your dog is doing better

Scott, I agree about the use of a gun. Though, my wife almost always opts for a shotgun, as she is terrified of the critters and can hardly make herself take a step closer, once she sees them.

Bre, I have a saying about Oklahoma: "Oklahoma is a wild place, looking for an excuse to get wilder." A couple years ago my two livestock guardian dogs tangled with a bear. They came home "deliriously happy," like a couple of sailors coming back from leave in a rough and tumble port. I'm sure the Pyrenees had some cracked ribs. He took it easy for a couple days after that. The bear, well, I'm pretty sure he just moved his den a little further out into the woods. Our bears aren't large.

We are surrounded by oak woods, rushing creeks and pastures. The Illinois River is only a few miles away. I'm sure that some big game comes up (or down) the river. Livestock guardian dogs are the foundation of our livestock operation. I'm convinced they run a lot of predators off.

George

Scott,

My spouse is a cop and has been for over 30 years, so guns are a constant presence in our lives. We always are extremely careful. I do remember reading about the incident you mentioned and was appalled by it.

I do not really like guns myself, so usually call a friend who lives less than a mile away and he comes over and does the shooting for me. I carried a gun outside with me constantly for a few months after the two cougar encounters within 6 weeks (because, of course, I was petrified with fear), but eventually I calmed down. You may have heard about the recent double shooting/homicide of two elderly people in Love County a couple of weeks ago. That made me nervous so I started carrying a handgun out to the garden with me. I just didn't have it with me when I had the snake in the potato patch.

I am ultra careful with guns and don't even like them but they are a necessity when you live on rural property inhabited by tons of wildlife.

My husband is kind-hearted and doesn't want to shoot any chicken or rat snakes. For years, he'd catch and release them elsewhere on our property, a decision on his part that I never cared for. They'd be back in the chicken coop in a day or so. After I found a rat snake in the guinea coop with his body wrapped around a half-grown keat and three others gone, and presumably eaten by him, I insisted he stop the catching and releasing of them and just start shooting them since they always came right back. We try to live as peaceably as possible with all the wildlife, but there are some animals you just cannot tolerate having in the yard, garden, barn, garage, etc. The snakes can freely inhabit about 12 of out 14.4 acres with no interference from us, but they aren't tolerated on the couple of acres around the house and outbuildings. In fact, as much as I hate to admit it, the snakes perform the valuable function of controlling field mice, voles and other rodents. We'll be overrun by those rodents were it not for the snakes. However, we rely upon our cats to do the job of rodent control in the outdoors areas around the house, and they do their job well.

George, Your dogs sure do live an adventurous life. We do not have bears here, and I am glad.

Dawn

George,

Im most certain your pyrenese run off anything and everything. I have a huge pyrenese/anatoli cross and a pure pyranese. Nothing and i mean nothing comes into our pastures without those dogs being on it in a heartbeat. Not even another dog. They were bred for centuries to guard livestock and they do their job well. At one time we had a Llama out with them, they are excellent guards too.

I witnessed my female pyranese charge a large coyote at full speed and spin him around and up in the air, and what happened after that wasnt pretty. They are tough tough dogs. Im sure that bear that yours got ahold of moved on quickly and with his head hung low.

I agree with the guns. I actually took the concealed carry class for my permit, although i have never taken a gun off of the property. Too many people, including the police, get too excited and dont think about where a bullet might land before they shoot. Im pretty sure we have a very smart group of people here. Weve seen snakes here that we shouldnt be seeing. Like rattlesnakes, weve seen them the past 2 years. I wonder of the drought is driving them sll towards water.

Emma

Ah Emma! Don't get me going on the virtues of these dogs! I cannot speak highly enough of them. Yes, they are huge. I tend to forget. Earlier this week Bravo came up limping. I suspected he chased a car and got clipped. (I constantly try to teach them not to chase cars. The best I've managed is to get them not to really try to catch them.)

Anyway, one of our neighbors dropped by and was chatting with one of our daughters. She mentioned that Bravo might have been hit by a car. Without skipping a beat our neighbor commented: "Oh, that's too bad. I hope it was a truck with a cattle guard. Otherwise the car probably came out the worse for it." Of course, he was joking.

I know they kill predators. But I have been quite impressed when Bravo meets intruding dogs and escorts them off the property. He's also mastered the ability of scanning the sky and protecting our birds from winged predators.

George

Dawn- Reading your post, my 1st reaction was to pull my feet up in my chair and shiver!! UGH! I have been trying to teach myself to remain calm when I see a snake because there is normally a 2 or 3 year old with me, or both, and I don't want to inflict my fear onto them. I am also trying to teach them that they are NOT the "wormies" they think they are, and that you need to STOP, DON'T TOUCH. And I am trying to teach all 3 not to pick up rocks, stick you hands in holes, or piles of brush. I told our 7 year old about how a rattler sounds, and what she should do. But its not something I am doing a good job of teaching myself! I am forgetful I guess, and should practice what I try to preach. So thank you so much for the reminder that I need to be careful in my ground tending work, look before I reach, and a rock bar, and a hoe are my best friend. And to watch my feet, I am terrible about all this. I just hope I learn before its too late!

So far the 3 snakes I have seen, one when I was clearing out a bunch of leaves, and 2(a mating pair) while I was pulling weeds. They were greyish brown with a yellowish under belly, all 3 about a foot long. My husband says they were brown snakes? In fact, its sad, but I had to just Google a copperhead, and a water moccasin just because I wasn't sure I knew what they looked like.

I don't blame you about taking out your lily pond! Our neighbors dog that got killed by the snake, she had just watered the garden that morning and let her dogs out about an hour later and it was under some bushes in the puddles of water. So, I think because of this story, I will never water in the mornings unless I just have to.

My husband bought me a hoe at the beginning of spring. He told me it was a multipurpose tool, garden work and snake killing. But maybe he should have bought me that compact handgun I have been wanting haha. Seriously though, even with a hoe, I would be too scared to get close enough to try and kill it! I guess the only good news is that my boxer pup is normally out with me and she is fiercely protective over her yard. I would hope the way she reacts to turtles is an indication of how she would react to a snake, and it would alert me.

The cougar thing just makes my skin crawl!! I can't believe you have had all those encounters! But, I guess I should say it doesn't surprise me. My mom and step dad live in south-eastern Kansas and have seen one, and my grandparents lived not to far from there too, and found several paw prints and had sightings. So I know they move in and around this part of the states.

We live about about a mile east of the lake, and while there are houses between us the lake, all houses are surrounded by a Wildlife Refuge, so the refuge is to the east and comes up to the south of us, which puts it at about 1/4 of mile, then it wraps around to the west. We basically live on an island, water surrounds us on 3 sides, but between the water and houses is the refuge.

The day I walk out and find anything inside my fenced in garden is the day I quit!! LOL If it wants in there that bad, well it can stay in there until I call someone else to come take care of it. I would have screamed and ran if I walked out to a bobcat in my garden! You handle these situations just like a country woman should! And while you say those aren't the memories you want to leave your son with, I would venture to guess those are the ones he loves, and makes him look at you as a very strong woman, and that that's what he will look/has looked for in a spouse, someone as strong nature as his mom. :)

I am closer to George then I am you, so I will listen for what he sees, and take notes! But a ring-tailed cat? Had to look it up, how neat! I just saw my 1st bat the other night and thought that was cool, so now I am looking forward to seeing more! My husband did hear some wild pigs here awhile back while he was out night-fishing, and I really didn't believe him until I came across some business cards for wild pig hunts, and eradication in town one day.. And alligators?? Are you serious? My mind is just blown, I can't imagine. I wanted to move to the Broken Bow area, but maybe I will stay up here with the "man-sized" catfish.

I want chickens, but it sounds like maybe I better get over my fear of snakes 1st, that way if I find one in my coop, I don't run screaming!

George- I like that saying about Oklahoma! I think its defiantly more wild here then Kansas. So there really are bears here..wow..I have been hoping since I saw that news report that maybe some idiot had got one and tried to keep it as a pet, then let it go. Who would have thought? Not me, you say bear, Oklahoma wouldn't have been in my top 10 answers!

The Pyrenees sounds like an interesting breed. My mom said her's(like 6/8 months old) has been hopping the fence, or squeezing between the wire on the fence, and she will find her out in the back pasture with the cows, eating grass like she's one of them! But she did try to get stupid with a male and female coyote here a couple days ago, and my step-dad had to call her back and kennel her, they said she's still to small to protect her domain from them? Anyways, they sound like great dogs to have around.

Thanks everyone for the wildlife education!!

Bre

Emma, We always have had snakes here in plentiful amounts, but then our back property line sits only about a quarter-mile from the Red River, so it would be shocking if we didn't have oodles of snakes. I can link the rise and fall of our snake population more to the river itself than to the weather. After a big rainfall year like 2007 when there was widespread flooding, we hardly saw any snakes at all whatsoever for the next year.(it was terrific!) Then,after almost 13" of rain in one day and widespread flash flooding in April 2009, we didn't see many snakes at all until thef following spring. I suspect the flooding had made a big dent in their population in both 2007 and 2009. 2010 seemed normal. In 2011, we saw relatively few. Perhaps the heat had a negative impact on the survival of their young.

In every summer, as it gets hotter and drier and the ponds and creeks dry up, the snakes we do have will move to any available body of water, including a bird bath or small water lily pond, but I don't think we have more....I just think they venture closer to us humans out of necessity.

I always think that we have too many snakes, but then the one neighbor to our W/NW whose home sits between us and the Red River has vastly more snakes than we do. I am glad his property is there as a buffer between our place and the river. He can sit on his front porch and shoot snakes night after night after night and still more and more keep coming.

Bre, With repeated efforts, the kids will learn. Country kids learn at an early age that there are some things they need to be really careful about. Sometimes, though I think we forget to look at things from their perspective. When our son was dating a young woman who had a little girl who was then just a toddler, she and I built a Peter Rabbit potager garden. We spend oodles of time playing in the dirt, reading the simplest versions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and planting similar crops in our Peter Rabbit Garden. She was so excited, and so was I, but for different reasons. We had a darling little picket fence, but we had completely different attitudes towards the fence and the Peter Rabbit Garden. I wanted to close the gate to keep the real cottontail rabbits out of the Peter Rabbit Garden, but she wanted to leave the gate open at night so that Peter Rabbit and his friends could come into the garden and eat! Clearly, we had different ideas about the purpose of the garden, and this experience taught me to remember to look at things from a 2 or 3 year-old child's perspective and not just my own.

Be sure your hoe is sharpened so that it will chop a snake in half. A dull hoe won't do the job and you do not want to have an angry snake that feels threatened coming at you.

We see brown snakes all the time here. They just turn and run. I believe they are as startled by seeing us as we are by seeing them. Oops, I forgot to link the website earlier that has photos of snakes of Oklahoma....I'll link it now.

Occasionally we have lost a cat to snakebite but not a dog, and my little cat, Spots, who is sitting here on the couch beside me as I type this has been bitten twice. She rarely goes outside any more....though it is hard to guess if her love of sleeping on the sofa in the air-conditioned house is related to past bad experiences with snakes or not. One cat almost died, but then survived. He was almost comatose for almost two weeks from a copperhead biite to his groin area, and still bears the scar. He is the only cat we've had that had the copper rash in the area where he was bitten. One of our neighbors who was bitten by a copperhead had a similar rash near the site of her bite.

One of our neighbors had an old little dog named Rascal when we moved here. He might not have been a full-blooded rat terrier, but his appearance was somewhat like a rat terrier. That was the bravest little dog I've ever seen. He completely hated snakes. When he saw one, he'd catch it, shake it a certain way to break its neck, and then would skin it and eat it. He was a completely amazing little dog. He lived to a pretty old age and then just disappeared. We always assumed a coyote or something got him.

The cougar encounters were quite unsettling at the time. I always thought it would be cool to see one "in the wild" until I actually sow one. When we were in our pickup truck going someplace and saw two walk across the road in front of us, that was cool. Having one roar at me? Not cool. Having one in the yard twice in one year, and right by my garden. Not cool. I have to be honest and say that for a couple of months after those two incidents, I only went to my garden to harvest and then immediately came back inside. Being out there made my skin crawl. For a couple of years after that, every time I walked down to the spot where I saw the second one, which was about 12' from me when I first noticed it, my body had an involuntary reaction.....heart pounding, fear, that fight-or-flight feeling. I was worried that my brain would never "get over" that experience and always would feel creeped out, but eventually I got to where I could be in that area without having the feeling of fear.

Your location sort of guarantees you'll see lots of wildlife and most of it will be a wonderful experience. I love seeing all the wildlife as long as I am in a location where I don't feel like they can get to me. Just today we had a turtle laying eggs under the plum tree (she lays her eggs there every year) and a wild turkey walking up and down the driveway and all around my garden. The turkey has been here for weeks. It is a male looking for a female and apparently can't find one, so it does the mating dance for my chickens who stand in their fenced chicken room and stare at it like it is an idiot, why their roosters just all puffed up and upset and stomp around trying to scare off the turkey. Usually one of our more bold cats will start walking towards the turkey and it then will vanish into the woods. I enjoy having that sort of wildlife around, but don't like seeing the predators too much.

Nothing flusters my son, who is a professional firefighter or my husband, who is a cop, but the cougar incidents came close. Of course, they were inside the house either watching TV or on their computers each time and missed the really exciting part. Both of them have shot their share of snakes and skunks.

The gators are rare, but not unheard of. Sometimes they are found in or very near the Red River. Sometimes they have made themselves at home in a stock tank. It always makes the news specifically because it is so rare. The year before we bought our land, which was 1997, a gator was found in a stock tank on property about a half mile from ours. On the day I drove up from Fort Worth so I could be here on the day that the electric co-op guys were installing our poles and electric lines and our water co-op was putting in our water line, the guys working here warned me that two different people----one in town in Marietta and one right here on our road---had been bitten by snakes that day. With one of them, the snake wouldn't let go of the person, so the medics had to cut the body off the snake and take the person to the ER with the snake still attached to the person's body. That was a creepy image. Those utility workers wanted to be sure I understood just how many snakes we have around here, so that I would be careful. I appreciated so much that they were so concerned. (I also was horrified when I thought about how we had walked all over that property with the real estate guy when we were considering buying it....we walked through Johnson grass in the bar ditch that was head high, we walked all over the woods, the fields, up and down the creeks, etc. We went places I never go now because there's always so many snakes there! Live and learn.....

We have bats every summer. I love seeing them. They are one thing you do need to teach your kids not to touch, for obvious reasons. They usually come out around twilight and, at least at our place, they always flock to the outdoor security light looking for bugs. I love to sit out in the lawn chairs and watch them. Discovering the bat activity here was a really neat surprise.

Feral hogs are very dangerous and can kill a person. A couple of ranchers west of Marietta had some very close calls with them and narrow escapes from them a couple of years ago. I usually hear them before I see them, and I always go inside when I see them. Well, once I did go into the woods looking for them (what was I thinking?) and found them in the creek....they often travel the creeks, which often have only very shallow water in them....and then I hightailed it right back to the house. The first time a feral hog ran out into the road in front of me, it was so big that I was sure I was seeing a hippo. I see them more often when we are out at wildfires in remote locations than when we are at home on our own property. I don't like seeing them. They tend to be really aggressive.

I see coyotes a lot, and have had our dogs get in fights with them, which scares me. My dogs are pet mutts, not livestock guardian dogs and pet dogs often get the worst end of the deal when they tangle with coyotes. There is nothing worse than hearing a fight to the death between a coyote and dog and thinking that it might be your dog. It wasn't....but the sound of it all was so terrifying that a neighbor came running from about 100 yards away to check on me because he thought the coyote fight was on our property....it might have been, but it was west of the house in a dense woodland....and he and I both knew all our dogs were home and accounted for.

You cannot be a gardener and avoid wildlife because it will be out there with you and your children. Most of the time, you'll love seeing it. Even the animals I personally find frightening are still something that it is thrilling to see....after you get over the fear. Most coyotes turn and run. I've had more trouble with deer that want to pick a fight with me than with coyotes. About 90% of the time, the coyotes turn and run. We had trouble with a couple of coyotes for a few months that looked like cross-breeds between coyotes and domestic canines. A neighbor called them coyote hybrids and warned me that they had enough domestic dog in them that they didn't fear humans like normal coyotes do, and I sure did learn that for myself.

I love living here but I've told Tim many times that if I every encounter a bear near my garden, I'm packing up and moving back to Texas. I wouldn't actually do it, but at that point it would seem like a great idea.

We rarely have wildlife in our garden any more because we kept raising the fence higher and higher to keep the wildlife out. Now both the front garden and the back garden have fences 8' tall, and both have two gates....because you need a way out if a wild thing comes in one gate.

The worst sound I've ever heard is the rattle of a rattlesnake. I always freeze in my tracks and try to determine which direction the rattle is coming from so I can go in the opposite direction. The closest I've ever had a venomous snake to me was a pygmy rattler about two inches from my hand. When I saw it, I instantly and instinctively did a backwards somersault (I was crouching low to the ground before I saw it) to get away from it....and I was glad no one was around to see that odd movement. It was in late February or early March when the snakes usually are not out and about. I have seen snakes out in every month except January, though we usually see them only from about March or April through November. Some breeds of snakes are very aggressive, but others are a lot more passive and would rather flee than stay there and fight you. I try to give them a chance to flee and get away. All my neighbors will come over and shoot a snake for me, and sometimes more than one will come and I will think to myself "they are having too much fun with this.....:". I appreciate them though, and think we have the absolute best neighbors in the world. It is one of the reasons I love living here.

On the page linked below, click on the photo gallery to see the various snakes featured there. There are 46 kinds of snakes in OK, but only 7 of them are venomous. At our house, brush piles and compost piles are prone to have snakes lying around them in the summer months, so I pile on the compostable materials, but I never turn the pile and I only remove compost from it in winter.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Snakes of Oklahoma

Dawn- I am sure the more I remember to teach it and preach it the more they will remember. Toddlers are tricky though in my opinion, their curiosity sometimes gets the best of them, and for that reason, I have gone around the property and tried to make sure that any potential snake/scorpion/wildlife dangers are not within their reach or completely destroyed. I have dismantled piles of rocks, burned plenty of brush, and done just about anything I could think to keep them safe. I guess that's the city in me. :)

I love your story about the Peter Rabbit garden! And what a cute idea! 2 and 3 year old's definitely see the world differently then we do, and with one of each, I am normally flying by the seat of my pants!

I will have to remember to go sharpen my hoe. I also decided that I should probably look into some better shoes then just old broken down tennis shoes. I was thinking maybe some of those tall rubber boots. They might help a bit better if I were to step on something. Its funny speaking of shoes, one thing I have down to an art is always checking my shoes for spiders before I put them on. Now if I can teach myself to be that diligent about watching my steps and reaching into things!

Cats are obviously tougher then I would think they would be given their size! My guess would be Spots likes the AC! At least, if I were a cat, it would be my choice too! I have never in my life heard of a dog skinning a snake! That must of been a sight to see!

I don't blame you one bit about the cougars! I think the whole thing sounds not cool! And I would have been right there with you, I would have ran out to harvest, and ran right back in with my heart pounding in my chest! And I think I would have thought twice about a garden the following year!

I laughed upon hearing about the turkey and your chickens! I am excited to see the wildlife, but like you, I would like to see it when I feel safe, not threatened. Right now I have a 4 foot fence around my garden, and I expect once the corn comes in I will find the deer/coons eating at it, but I hope that's all! And I do enjoy walking out and seeing the deer, showing the kids. Our daughter wrote a report on Saturn this year for school, so a few weeks ago we took her out when it was closest to Earth, and showed it to her. It was great. But if I ever see a bear or a gator, get bit by a snake, I'm done, back to Kansas to a nice city I go! OK, maybe not bc I love it here, but I would forever be creeped out!

EEK about the snake still being attached! I went to EMT/Paramedic school and work in the only Pediatric ER in the state of Kansas. But it was in the largest city in Kansas, so snakes were not something we talked about much, and since moving here, all I can think is what did I learn to do in case? And its scary bc all I remember is something about certain snakes you want to elevate the bitten area. Sadly, I think I tuned out the wrong chapter! Maybe I should pull out those books and brush up since it would take medics at the least 20 minutes to get to us. Funny, I never thought I would be learning so much from moving here and wanting a garden!

This might sound silly, but will the bats ever get close enough that the kids might want to touch? And what were you thinking going to look at those hogs?!?! That is just crazy! Sounds like you have great neighbors. Ours are mostly older, retiree's living on the lake..I don't think I could count on one of them to help even if I was screaming bloody murder and squirting blood..But I plan on trying to win them over by taking them some fresh veggies this summer. And I am hoping that us cleaning this place up, and taking care of it will leave them feeling at ease.

I will be checking out that link for the snakes, and plan on sitting down and showing it to my daughter(7) so she can get an idea of what we should be looking for, and not just grabbing it thinking its fun to play with!

All in all Dawn, I love hearing your stories, and reading your advice. You seem like a person who I would love to sit and have a cup of coffee with, and just hear the stories/advice you have. And I am glad you and your garden are just fine after last nights storm!

Bre

Bre,

Your kids will learn. Kids are really smart, which is good. The unfortunate part is that they are really curious and their curiosity can lead them into danger. For what it is worth, we have lived here for 15 years and I only remember one case of a small child being bitten by a rattlesnake. That 2 or 3 year old child was airlifted to a hospital and made a great recovery. I can think of dozens of cases of adults being bitten during the same time frame....so maybe we need to give the kids more credit!

I agree with checking your shoes for spiders. Scorpions and brown recluse spiders were already in our house when we moved in. Likely they moved indoors while the house was being built. I haven't seen a scorpion indoors in years, but for a few years they were all over the place. I don't think we'll ever get rid of the brown recluse spiders. I never put on a shoe without shaking it to make something fall out, and that is especially true with rubber boots because if a spider falls down into one of them, it cannot climb out.

When I am working in the pastures or woodland areas, I wear leather, steel-toe workboots. My favorite brand is Caterpillar and a pair lasts me for years and years. In the garden I wear running shoes most of the time, or Crocs or garden boots when it is wet and muddy. The Crocs I have are more like real shoes than regular Crocs and don't have any holes in them.

I did give up wearing sandals and any sort of open-toed or open-heeled shoes after we moved here. Even if all I was doing was walking out the back door and walking 30' to the car wearing a pair of shoes like that, something (a bee, a wasp, a ground hornet, a scorpion, or fire ants usually) would manage to find the opening in a shoe and sting or bite me. I miss wearing pretty shoes, but in our rural location, practical and safe footwear is better.

Our first garden fence was 3' tall and didn't keep out much of anything. I hated to go with a taller fence (it makes me feel like I am in a concentration camp or prison or something), so our first effort at keeping the deer out was to put a second 3' tall fence 3-4' away from the first. I had heard that this sort of double fence would keep the deer out. For a long time it did, and then some smart deer figured out it could carefully jump into that small area between the 2 fences and then jump over the second fence into the garden....then it taught all the other deer how to do the same thing. I grew flowers in what we called the "flower moat" between the two fences, but had to choose carefully and plant only the most deer-tolerant flowers because they would eat the flowers if I put something in that area that they liked.

In a drought year, the deer were coming over the double fence every night, so we took down the outer fence and raised the inner fence from 3' to 8'. Since raccoons can climb, the fence doesn't keep them out, but as long as I remember to close the gates, it keeps out the deer. They have gotten into the garden twice, but that was because I forgot to close the gate.

Racoons often get every single ear of corn here. They get it by picking it a few days before it is ripe. They are wasteful, taking a bite from one ear, tossing it on the ground, and then repeating that action over and over. If they would listen to me, I'd tell them to wait until it is ripe and then it would taste better and they wouldn't reject so many ears and toss them on the ground after one bite.

Most of my corn grows in a corn cage, which is just a fenced corn patch that has a chicken wire 'roof' and a gate that closes very tightly. They've never gotten a single ear from corn grown in that corn cage unless I screwed up and planted too close to the fence and they could reach through the fencing and take ears. In two areas, this year I am experimenting with milk thistle. I have planted milk thistle completely around the rows of corn within the fenced garden (not the corn cage, which is a separate area across the driveway from the big garden) so that they form a short hedge of very prickly plants. I have learned via research that most coons won't try to make their way through the milk thistle to get to the corn, so that is a theory I am testing this year. If it works, I'll be one happy camper. I know one thing....if I was a coon, I wouldn't want to crawl through the milk thistle. My plants are still fairly small and it hurts if you touch them. It hurts a lot!

What little experience I have with having neighbors snakebitten is that you always elevate the leg if they are bitten on the leg or foot---I think that is to slow down the flow of the venom to other parts of the body. Once they get to the hospital, they're put on IVs to flush the venom out of their bodies.

Normally a healthy bat will not approach a human or, for as far as that goes, they've never approached our animals. They fly fairly high, presumably at the same level where they are finding flying insects to eat. The time you'd find a bat within reach of a child would be when an injured or sick (likely rabid) bat is lying on the ground. Last year, one of our firefighters wasn't thinking and picked up a bat off the ground and was carrying it around. I was like "what was he thinking????" lol You just have to teach your kids not to pick up any wild animal....even a cute little brown bat or bunny or whatever. Then, you have to hope they remember that when they grow up and become adults. Our FF friend was not bitten while carrying around that brown bat, by the way.

What was I thinking when I went to see the hogs? Honestly? I guess I wasn't thinking, but I did want to know if they were on our property or the property next door. Once I realized where they were, I hightailed it back home. To be fair, we had not lived here long at that point and I think I underestimated how dangerous wildlife can be. I am older and wiser now. I also did not understand then how dangerous wild dogs (the kind city dwellers drive out and dump in the country as if the dogs mysteriously know how to hunt food and survive) could be. We lost a lot of our poultry to wild dogs in our early years here, and had to learn that feral dogs are dangerous predators.

I have inadvertently picked up snakes while picking up tomato cages (the snakes wrap themselves around them and seem to rub against them to help them somehow when they are shedding their skin), bales of hay (no matter how careful I have tried to be, every now and then I carry a bale and then discover a snake is inside it), etc. Each close call is a lesson that hopefully prevents future close calls.

When we first moved here, I had some uncomfortable conversations with nearby farmers and ranchers who wanted to change me. Everything I did was just wrong, wrong, wrong in their eyes. Gardening organically, planting in wide rows in raised beds, and interplanting herbs, fruit and flowers with my veggies made them crazy. Mulching my garden made them crazy. Releasing beneficial insects in my garden made them crazy. I am sure they thought I was nuts or very stupid. They tried like mad (and not very respectfully either, being happy to point out that I was doing everything the wrong way) to change me. I wouldn't argue back with them. I just tried to joke about it. I'd tell them "I'm a gardener, not a farmer" or, when one of them would say "girl, someone needs to teach you how to plant in a straight line", I'd shoot back at them "I don't want to plant in a straight line...that is not a straight line gone bad...it is grid planting done deliberately and on purpose for a specific reason". When one of them would say "why do you grow weeds (that's what they called my herbs and flowers) in there with your veggies? You know you cannot eat weeds", I'd fire right back at him by saying "you eat poke weed and lambs quarters"). I can laugh now, but they really frustrated me in the beginning. I had to stand my ground and defend my way of doing things. If I let them push me around, they'd push harder, so I had to be pretty firm that I wasn't changing because they thought I should. I tried not to get angry with them because they were genuinely trying to teach me how to do things their way, which they considered the only right way to do it, of course. How did all this work out? We all lived happily ever after. Once they had watched me for a couple of years, they just shut up and stopped criticizing my methods. Eventually some of them began to ask me specific questions like how I handled corn earworms organically...or grasshoppers. I always went out of my way to share fruit, veggies, herbs and even bouquets of flowers with them and their wives. (People say women are catty, but the women here were a lot less tough on me than the men were!) After a few years, one of them told Tim "You know, Dawn is really smart and she knows what she is doing", but he never said that directly to me. : ) It is okay. I suspect he knew Tim would repeat it to me. Tim told me that it did not escape their notice that my garden was highly productive and that I always had the first ripe tomato, which frustrated them since they thought I knew so little and did everything the wrong way. Most of that crowd of old farmers or old ranchers are gone now but we got to know all of them and they became our friends as did they children and grandchildren, and I kinda miss having someone stop by my garden (every. single. day.) to tell me what I am doing wrong. Each time one of them passes away, I grieve for them. Knowing them has enriched our lives so much.

Just be yourself, be friendly and share your garden bounty with your new neighbors, let them get to see who you are and you'll fit in. Maybe it takes a couple of years? So what if it does? Maybe it will take less time. Maybe more. It all works out in the end. People here embraced us and made us feel like we belonged while our house was still under construction. We'd come up on weekends to clear brush out of the fencelines, and they'd stop by and invite us to come over and fish in their stock tank, offer us the use of their tractor, etc. I was flabbergasted by how warmly they treated us....like they always had known us. I hope your new neighbors will treat you the same way, and I suspect they will. When you are in a rural or semi-rural area, it is often your neighbors who will be the unofficial first responders who come running to help you when someone gets hurt and you need an ambulance, or your car breaks down...or the lawnmower breaks down and they come over to offer you their mower to use...and not as a catty way of saying your grass is getting too tall, but out of genuine kindness. When you are some distance away from official help, you all lean on each other and help one another. That's when you realize that your neighborhood is a community in the truest sense of the word.

One of our neighbors was involved in a horrific accident (not his fault, either) involving several people and animals once. Within a short period of time, everyone from our end of the road was involved in it in one way or another....either at the scene helping round up the animals to get them to the vet's office, or going to the hospital to wait with the injured people and comfort them, or going to the home of the deceased person and comforting them. Later on, everyone took the affected persons food and flowers and comforted the grieving and those who survived but were so upset about the person who did not survive. That was when I understood deep in my heart that we truly belonged here. I realized that we didn't just have "new neighbors" but, in fact, had a "new family". I love living here in Love County and the people here are the main reason why. We really did not feel like strangers in a foreign land for long. Of course, the easiest way to fit in here is to never, ever, ever admit you root for a college football team from Texas.

I still may be the only woman in my county who doesn't put on camo and go deer hunting in the fall, but there's still some things this former city woman just won't do..... : )

Dawn

Dawn- Yes, the kids will learn. And so will I.

I have yet to see any scorpions here, but I am sure they are here. I learned dumping my shoes as a kid from my grandma, when they lived on 160+ acres in southeast Kansas. I can remember one time a toad or frog being in my shoes at her house.

I am a barefoot kinda gal, and I have had to stop myself several times and remember its not the best of ideas here to be running around barefoot. So I am normally in flip flops if I am just running about. If I am working its tennis shoes. I couldn't imagine giving up sandals and pretty shoes. I guess in time I just might after I have been stung or bit by things a few times.

Those dang deer. They are smarter then we give them credit for! I am hoping to keep the coons and deer happy with the sunflowers I planted. I hope that the rows at the back of the property and the fact that I put them up around the garden fence will keep them happy and out of my corn! But if not I will be interested to see how the milk thistle experiment turns out!

That would be so frustrating to hear all the time about how your doing something wrong. I probably wouldn't have reacted like you with the kill them with kindness trick. But I am glad in the end they all came around.

I have a sneaking suspicion that while my neighbors may come around a bit, they will mostly keep to themselves, and want the same from me. They are all older, and Northeastern OK and the lakes in this area are going through a retiree boom, and it seems most people in my area are not too happy a young family with 3 small kids, and 2 dogs moved in. What will they think when I get chickens haha! Oh, and the fence makes them mad. We fenced in a portion off the back of the house for the kids, and they aren't happy bc no one wants fences, it disturbs the wildlife is what someone finally said AFTER the fence has been up for months. Funny you mention the lawn mower. I think that's what made me realize these people are not that nice. It was 100+ out, end of summer, a storm rolling in, my husband was still at work, and that grass NEEDED mowed, its my pet peeve. My neighbor watched me push mow half an acre around the side of the house, with the mower on its last leg, smoking, then got up, went and got out his fancy riding mower, and mowed his lawn! I was mad, and a little hurt. I don't know what I expected, given I was a "stranger" but the values and roots my parents instilled in me, were not to do something like that, they were to help your neighbor.

I am sorry to hear about your neighbors accident, no matter how long ago. But I am glad that you managed to find a family unit in a place where you had no family around you. Its always nice to have people you can call family.

Ms. Dawn, you have a fantastic day playing in the dirt. I have mowing to tend to, and a couple of piles of brush to burn. And while I am messing with the brush piles, I will be on the look-out for fangy, slithery things! Especially after I had a lizard scared the dickens out of me in my garden yesterday!

Bre

Bre,

The future is in children. Anyone who doesn't like children is out of touch with reality. We'd be delighted if there were more little ones in the neighborhood!

We moved to Oklahoma from NJ back in 2005. Where we lived, out there, it was normal to mind other people's business. It was a pleasant surprise, when we moved to Tahlequah, to have local people answer some of my questions with: "Sir, this is Oklahoma. What you do on your place is your business." We knew then that we had come home.

George

George- Well maybe we should have moved to the Tahlequah area then! We looked in that area, more around the Keys, something Hills area, but it didn't feel like home. I would like to think I am raising good kids, yes sir/ma'am, no sir/ma'am, pleases, thank you's. But they are kids and when they get outside, they run wild, screaming like banshees.

I don't really want people in my business, but being friendly with your neighbors, or making friends is always nice.

Bre,

All those old guys meant well. I truly believe that. It is just they weren't organic and they didn't believe in cottage style gardens like mine with everything mixed together because they were row farmers. We all got along. One of them became so bold that when I'd give him squash or something from the garden, he'd ask me to come over and cook it for him. By that time his dear wife's health was failing but his wasn't. I told him (nicely) to cook it himself or to get his daughter-in-laws to cook it. They both only lived a short distance from him. (For anyone who has read about my farmer friends for years now, that person was NOT Fred.) He simply grew up in a world where women cooked and men didn't but I felt like he needed to change with the times.

Children are a blessing. Most all the children in our neighborhood are all grown up and it is really quiet now, except some of them are becoming parents themselves so we occasionally hear the delightful sound of wild banshees playing outside when the kids and grandkids come home to visit their parents/grandparents. The houses are pretty far apart here, so you don't hear much anyway because it mostly is too far away.

I understand that some people don't like fences that block their view, but they need to get over it. When you have children and pets, a fenced yard keeps them safer. Tim grew up in Pennsylvania where their neighborhood backed up to a big farm and no one had fences. As long as you didn't have a fence, it was easy to pretend those hundreds of acres of mixed farmland and woodland were yours....it was a magnificent view as late as the mid-1980s. Now? Fences that block the view are more popular because that old farm is gone and has been replaced by a housing development filled with hundreds of home. It is kind of sad, but it happens. A beautiful view does not necessarily last forever.

If anyone said anything to me about my fence here, I'd whack them over the head with a trowel! Without a fence, I wouldn't be able to grow anything because of the deer, rabbits and other wildlife. Well, Tim's best friend calls my 8' tall garden fence ":the prison garden fence" because of its height, but he does it in a good-natured way so I don't take offense.

I agree with George. People should be delighted to have children and their dogs around. What is wrong with those people? Our children are the next generation---we need them. I feel sorry for people who cannot enjoy having kids around. In my opinion, if they wanted a child-free community that is all nice and quiet, they should have moved to a senior retirement community that doesn't allow children. Since they didn't, they need to adjust their attitudes.

Our friends who have grandchildren love having them around and the ones who don't have grandchildren yet like to borrow their friends' grandkids occasionally just to enjoy their company. Maybe we are just lucky to have neighbors like that.

George, People here have that attitude too. Unfortunately, we also have more than a few that think they can do whatever they want on our property too. In the early years, we ran off plenty of people who thought they could hunt for deer on our property without our permission. Tim would go into the woods armed and run them off. I stopped clearing greenbrier and poison ivy from the edges of the woodland that face the road because having them there helps keep poachers off our property.

I'm big-time into personal property rights, but also expect people who do not own our land, do not maintain it and do not pay taxes on it to stay off of it! The other day someone had the nerve to park on the road and start picking poppies from our front yard. I didn't plant those poppies there so people could cut their own free flower bouquets and I was not happy. Now, if they had asked permission to cut some wildflowers, I would have said yes and likely would have offered them some wildflower seeds, but they didn't even ask. That makes me angry.

Dawn

That's another story! People ought to respect private property.
But we do love children and firmly believe they ought to be able to run & play. Our neighbors' youngest has hung out with us since 2006. He's hardly a "kid" any more. But it sure has been great to have a part in his life. We taught him about poultry and dairy goats, etc. Now, when we need a hand... he's there.

This weekend we're expecting a special treat. One if the first students I taught, at the Bible Institute in Mexico, where we once served, is visiting with HIS FAMILY! They his three children are 9 years on down. Looking forward to a Spanish immersion weekend and lots of activities for children (fishing, camp fire, etc.)

George

Mark, I hope your dog makes it. When we have a dog with a snakebite, we almost always give it Benadryl immediately, especially if we cannot get the pet to a vet right away. There have been times when a dog bitten in the face had so much swelling that I was afraid the swelling was going to cut off their breathing and felt like the Benadryl kept the dog alive long enough to get it to the vet. We've never lost a dog to a copperhead bite but have friends who've lost a dog to a rattlesnake bite. The copperhead bites more often just seem to cause a lot of pain and swelling and sometimes the telltale copper-colored rash.

We did come very closely to losing a large dog bitten on the side of his nose by a timber rattler back in 2007 or 2008. He began going into shock and we were out of liquid Benadryl, so I broke open capsules, mixed them with water, and used a syringe to squirt it into his mouth. The swelling literally started diminishing right in front of our eyes and was almost completely gone in less than 30 minutes. It was a Sunday night and we took him to the vet the next morning and the vet checked him and said he ought to be fine. He is still with us and suffered no long-lasting ill effects, but carefully avoided getting anywhere near a wate rhose for the next couple of years. I guess he saw the snake that bit him and associated its shape with that of a water hose.

Our adult son narrowly avoided being bitten in the face by a copperhead recently when he bent over to pick up some construction material inside the garage. The copperhead was just outside the open garage door and our son didn't realize it was there, having opened the door from inside the garage. It tried to strike him but became entrangled in a rolled up piece of bird netting I had placed outside the garage door so I could put it inside the garage the next time the door was open. I hate to think about what it would have been like for him to take a copperhead bite to the face or neck region. All the snakes we have around here scare me, and the copperheads have been a lot more aggressive than usual in our neighborhood. We had tremendous flooding in May and then again a couple of weeks ago and a lot of us think the aggressiveness may stem from having a lot of snakes flushed up out of their usual territory by the river flooding and perhaps having to fight a little more for new territory.

We had a puppy get bitten by some kind of snake this spring in a location where a cat had narrowly avoided being bitten a couple of weeks before. The puppy was bitten on her snout and it swelled up pretty badly. We gave her Benadryl and rushed her to the vet (it was during regular office hours, thankfully, because emergency vet clinics are so expensive!). He gave her a steroid shot and the swelling immediately went down----by the time we made it back home there was no sign of the swelling at all. I was more worried about her bite than I normally am with a dog because we didn't know if it was a copperhead or a rattlesnake that got her and also because she was so young---a little over 6 months old at the time, I guess.

Based on having numerous snakebit animals over the years here, the bites that worry me most are the ones to the face. Our tabby cat bitten several years ago in the eye region was partially paralyzed for about 3 weeks and was at the vet's office for over a week on constant medication and an IV to keep flushing her system (and to keep her hydrated since she wouldn't eat). When we finally were able to bring her home, the vet said he wasn't sure if the facial paralysis even would go away because he'd never encountered a cat so severely affected in that way. Fortunately it did, but she couldn't close her eyes during that 3 weeks until the paralysis eased up. Our vet did a great job of saving her life because I really didn't think she was going to make it, and I don't know if he was confident she would survive either, but he was determined to do everything he could to save her.

The biggest problem I've seen with swelling on a dog's limb from a snakebite is that sometimes there is so much swelling that it interferes with the blood circulation. Usually Benadryl keeps the swelling from doing that, though. While Copperhead snake bites seem to cause a lot of swelling and pain, we've never lost a pet to one. We have lost cats to rattlesnake bites.

Please keep us posted on how your Siberian Huskie does.

Dawn