TRI-CITY HERALD (Kennewick, Washington) 09 August 07 Headless rattlesnake sends man to Richland hospital (Andrew Sirocchi)
When Danny Anderson went hunting for rattlesnakes with his dad outside Quincy, his father always told him to never touch a snake.
But Monday night, when a 5-foot rattler slithered onto his Yakitat Road property while the 53-year-old was feeding his horses, failing to heed his father's advice came back to bite him.
But it isn't as simple as all that. The snake that bit Anderson should have been dead.
He and his 27-year-old son Benjamin pinned the creature with an irrigation pipe and cut off its head with a shovel.
In fact, after hitting it with the shovel several times, the snake's head measuring about half the width of a tube of toothpaste ended up under a pickup.
"When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger," Anderson said. "I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose."
The snake head ended up in the bed of his pickup and Anderson landed in Kadlec Medical Center until Wednesday afternoon.
"I was mad that he scooped that out with his hand, and I was scared because I didn't know what to do," said his wife, Linda Anderson.
At first, Danny Anderson didn't want to go to a hospital but his wife insisted.
And by the time they raced the 10 minutes to Prosser Memorial Hospital, his tongue was swollen, and the venom was spreading from his index finger to the rest of his body.
"It felt like someone was holding my hand in a fire pit," said the repairman for Rowand Machinery. "It was one of the worst pains I ever had."
But it didn't end there.
After finding that Prosser didn't have the full series of six antivenin shots he needed, an ambulance rushed him the 30 miles to the Richland hospital.
Linda Anderson said the rattler was the first they'd seen since moving onto their property five years ago, and she believes a recent fire caused the snake to make its way toward their home on the five acres.
"We've seen quite a few bullsnakes out there at Yakitat but we're kind of wondering if the fire didn't just destroy their habitat," she said.
Mike Livingston, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist in the Wildlife Program, said the area where the Andersons live is near prime snake habitat and it's reasonable to think that a recent fire displaced the rattlers.
But Livingston said he had never heard of anyone being bit by a decapitated snake before.
"That's really surprising but that's an important thing to tell people," he said. "It may have been just a reflex on the part of the snake."
It's also possible the snake still had the ability to use the heat sensors to make one last attack.
Livingston suggested that if snakes are a good distance from a home, people should allow them room to pass through and they likely won't see them again.
If the snakes are threatening, though, Livingston said people should call the Washington State Patrol, which likely will send a wildlife officer to move the snake to another area.
The rattler that bit Anderson already has been buried by his son but Anderson said he wants to exhume it to collect the rattle.
And if another rattlesnake comes along, Anderson said he'll likely try to kill it again.
"I'm going to grab a shovel and bury it right there," he said. "It still gives me the creeps to think that son-of-a-gun could do that."
Headless rattlesnake sends man to Richland hospital

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