Hi.  Our names are Dottie and Daisy.  We had a really hard weekend.  It started with Daisy finding one of those long skinny squirmy lifeforms in our yard.  Daisy started barking at it, to alert the family that there was an intruder, and Mom and Dottie came to see what all the ruckus was about.  That thing started rattling, we started jumping at it, and it started lunging and biting us.  Whew, those things are fast!!!!!  Never saw it coming at us!  We did save Mom, though, no bites on her!  But alas, when the altercation was over, the score was Rattlesnake: 6, Dogs: O.  It didn’t hurt so much at first, then our faces and ears started swelling.  It was off to the vet rather quickly, then.  Here’s what Dr. Paula has to say about rattlesnake bites:  Number one, try to avoid them.  Leave those squirmy things alone, and they usually will leave you alone.  But that’s hard for us canines.  We usually have to go to a snake avoidance class to ever learn that lesson — it just isn’t in our DNA to leave them alone.  If you do get bitten by a rattlesnake, you  need to get to a vet as quickly as possible.  The more quickly the antivenin is administered, the better it will work.  You have to have an IV catheter, get IV fluids, antibiotics and that antivenin, to have much of a chance to survive and keep your skin.  You see, the most common rattlesnake in this area is the Diamondback, and it injects a hemotoxin into your blood — it causes your platelets to dysfunction, and you can bleed, and it causes the skin in the area of the bite to swell and die.  So you get this really bad swelling, the skin starts to die, and you can start bleeding internally and/or externally.  Bad stuff.  That’s the kind of snake that bit us.  There is also the Mohave Rattlesnake in this area that injects a neurotoxin that causes paralysis –  glad we didn’t tangle with one of those, this guy was bad enough.  So we spent the weekend in the hospital, getting IV fluids, the antivenin, and lots of pain medication.  We don’t really remember a lot of it.  We should get to go home soon, it looks like we’re both going to make it this time.  I think next time maybe we’ll just bark and run inside to tell the family that another one has invaded the yard, but we’ll stay inside as the fire department comes to remove it.   Now understand, we are still quite the brave little canines, just perhaps maybe a little wiser now.  Well, maybe a little wiser, but it is so hard to ignore those things — how do they move?  Have you ever seen a snake’s legs?  Where do they hide them?  It just isn’t right, you just can’t move like that without legs…..and they are so fast……What do you think Dottie, should we go outside and check again?  You go first…..you’re bigger…..I’m right behind you.