The Dog With Nine Lives

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Well, perhaps we'll start calling her "Puss". We have a small kelpie bitzer cross - for those not familiar with the Australian kelpie, it is usually a sheep dog, highly intelligent, fast, and easily trained. She has two speeds - on and off. In the on mood, taking her for a walk in out local forest is something of an experience; she will hear somehting in the long grasp, point, and then dive headlong into the grass. That's all fun, but Australia has a wide variety of very poisonous snakes. After one of her forays into the wilderness, we noticed she had a couple of cuts on her chest, so off to the vet for a shot and an inspection. Two weeks later, still not healed up, so back for a ten day course of anti-biotics. Today, still not healed, so back to find out that the wounds are almost certainly snake bite, and it won't heal because it has gone necrotic. Eventually it will fix itself, but in the meantime we have a very lucky dog, bitten deeply enough to leave fang marks, but not so deeply as to poison her. Or else she got bitten by a non-poisonous snake or a very young poisonous one. And there was I thinking snake bite was deadly without anti-toxins. Whew! We've put a moratorium on the forest till the middle of next autumn. Have you had a dog survive snake bite, or have some other lucky escape? Lash