Defeating My Snake Phobia

Snakes and I have had a challenging time together, from nothing at all together, to not liking them, to being phobic about them, and now, back to not liking them around my place, but OK about them other times.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

I live in South Australia, rural South Australia in fact, and I am a dog owner. My dogs most recently, before my current one, had been Pharaoh Hounds, a breed of dog that was bred to be a hunter, a hunter of rabbits in Malta in fact.

Dogs and snakes don’t go together well, especially the kind of snake that is sometimes around our place, Brown Snakes, which are highly poisonous, fatally so, in fact, if they bite, and you can’t ge the needed medical treatment in time.

If our last Pharaoh Hound, Missy saw a snake at our place, she would try to kill it. It’s happened before, and will go on happening with my current dog, Lenny, who I’ve written about here: https://kittycordo.medium.com/learning-about-my-new-dog-breed-the-greyhound-a15bd4825e2f

If Lenny were to see a snake, he’d try to catch it for sure. Lenny is a Greyhounds, a sight hound, and hunting is what sight hounds do, They see it, they chase it, and if they catch it, they will try to kill it, it’s in their genes, it’s their most enjoyable thing in life!

It was in our old dog’s genes too, the chase, the hunt, the kill. Missy was slowing down, but made it to the age of 14, and I feared that if Missy was to see a snake in our yard, and try to kill it, she wouldn’t make it through this time.

She’d almost died from such a meeting in the past, and keeping her alive cost us quite a bit of money, and wasn’t guaranteed to save her, but fortunately we got her to the vet quickly enough, they did a great job, and she was saved. But she still looked for snakes when she goes outside … It was natural to her.

Our new dog is a Greyhound, a beautiful big black dog, a retired racing Greyhound, named Lenny. And yes, Lenny would also try to catch and kill a snake if he saw one here, I’m sure of that. I’ve seen him trying to get a lizard that came into our backyard, then was trying to escape. I called Lenny away from the lizard, and it got though the fence and escaped … Phew!

Before any of that happened though, before we even had any sight hounds at all, and were…