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- BOSTON (Reuters) - Rattlesnakes can take revenge on those who attack
them even if their heads have been chopped off and they appear to be dead,
according to a study released on Wednesday.
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- "We found that a sizable proportion
of patients admitted for snakebites were injured when handling snakes they
presumed to be dead," said doctors Jeffrey Suchard and Frank LoVecchio
of the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix. "Imminently
fatal injuries do not prevent rattlesnakes from producing serious or even
multiple" bites, they said in a letter published in the New England
Journal of Medicine.
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- "Education to prevent snakebites
should include warnings against handling recently killed snakes."
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- The doctors found that snakes thought
to have been dead were responsible for five of the 34 rattlesnake bites
they treated between June 1997 and April 1998.
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- One of the five snakes had been shot
and decapitated, one had just been decapitated, two had been shot and one
had been bludgeoned with a piece of wood. None of the bites was fatal but
one man had to have a finger amputated.
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- "It's a reflex action," Suchard,
a toxicologist, told Reuters in a telephone interview. He said research
published in 1972 showed that snake heads could make striking-type motions
toward a mouse for up to 60 minutes after decapitation.
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- "Spanish explorers in the New World
reported that a decapitated snake would live for 10 days," he said,
but added this was probably an exaggeration.
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