Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bobcat kills rattler.

I came across this vid this morning. Pretty cool to watch. The cat has skills.

October? cool, and maybe snake was a little slow?....

I called in a bobcat once that came in holding a front paw up. It was swelled pretty bad.

Pretty much had to have gotten bitten while messing with a rattler.

Kitty does a victory lap on the carcass.

Awesome video. So do you think he ate the snake. If so and he swallows the head and venom glands wouldn’t that be like getting bit. Snake gets revenge in the end so to speak.

no

I have had intriguing encounters with Lynx, Bobcat, and Cougars, and they seem to have the same characteristics among them.
The Bobcat looks to be rubbing some of the venom off his face by rolling around??

Once that head is in its mouth, that's all she wrote.

My Pit mix moves so fast to kill snakes you can't even see what's going on. She sees a snake, and the next split second the snake's head is off.

I'm conflicted on this, since it's mainly rat snakes and corn snakes, which keep down the mice population around my house, but then I often have a problem with these snakes taking up residence in my hen house.

Great video. All in a day's work.

Looked it up myself after posting and it seems that is mostly correct, however if there is any open sores in the dogs mouth that the venom could get exposed to then it could enter the blood stream and do it’s damage. So in the end they suggest not letting that happen if it can be avoided. I’ve always had wondered about this a bit because my Billy Goat Lab will eat anything it finds in the outdoors.

I had a Chow that liked to play with snakes, he would pick a Gopher snake up and carry it around
He died from a Rattlesnake bite

I worked for a rancher who had a house cat that killed rattle snakes. One got her on the side of the head. Upper jaw line.

She laid around the house for a week or so and then was all healed up.

Great vid. Effortless. Bobcats are amazing athletes. Snake was doomed, total mismatch.

The only time a cat is good in my books is when they kill a snake.

the shootist;
Top of the morning Brother Keith, I hope that you and yours are well after Canada Day.

Thanks for the chuckle this morning, I do believe I knew you weren't a "cat guy" like I am, but I still like you anyways!

When we moved to the Okanagan nearly 40 years ago rattlers were much, much more common than now for whatever reason.

We'd bump into them up in the mountains hunting and hiking all the time and if someone came to visit and wanted to see a rattler in summer, there were a couple places we could drive to in the evening and see one about 2/3 of the time.

We moved onto our property here 30 years back and immediately got one yard cat, which was followed by a succession of at least one and up to three on the place all the time.

Here's the thing, in those 30 years we've had exactly one rattlesnake in the yard that we've found. Up on the blacktop in front of our place we'd see them, but close to never here.

I'll note too that the cats loved nothing better than to drag a blue racer or gopher snake down into the horse pen where it was all eaten off and trampled down, so they could torture the snake as long as their feline attention span felt like. I couldn't begin to count the number of snakes I rescued from the cats over the years but for sure it's dozens.

We've had bobcats in the yard too by the way as well as cougars by the tracks, so the wild cats do patrol the grounds as well, but they're not laying down a scent trail daily like the yard cats do.

As I understand it, rattlesnakes use scent a whole bunch in determining where they're headed.

I'm guessing here, but the cat smell could let the snake know that both an enemy to it as well as a competitor to it's hunting frequents the area and thus encourages it to look for greener, cat free hunting grounds.

Please note I have no biology degree, but that's where my reading has me arriving at on the question of why we don't get rattlers in the yard.

All the best to you and yours Brother Keith.

Dwayne