NEWS-ENTERPRISE (Elizabethtown, Kentucky) 11 August 07 Family keeps crossing paths with rattlers (John Friedlein)

Elizabethtown: Like some bad horror movie, rattlesnakes seem to have it out for a local family.

A timber rattler threatened 3-year-old Grace Maravilla in mid-July after the toddler set off on a crawdad hunting expedition, her mother said.

Second, the same kind of venomous snake last week apparently killed Maravilla’s grandmother’s boxer, Mimi.

While these two encounters happened in close succession, they seem to be a matter of where the family hangs out, rather than a reptilian conspiracy.

Both happened on Muldraugh Hill, a major escarpment that stretches from Floyds Knobs, Ind., to Lincoln County, entering Hardin County near Fort Knox and running between Elizabethtown and the Nelson County line. Rattlers thrive in this rocky hill country, said John MacGregor, state herpetologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. And they are found nowhere else in Hardin County.

“We want everybody to know that the snakes are there,” said the grandmother, Linda Edlin.

She said a rattler attacked Mimi, who had been tied up, after the dog freed herself from her collar. Upon returning from a jaunt to the Boston Food Mart, Edlin found Mimi dead in some weeds with puncture wounds on her leg. An expert, judging by the distance between the two marks, told her a rattler did it.

“I loved that dog,” she said. “I’m really heartbroken.”

Edlin, who lives in the Youngers Creek area, also suspects a rattler in the death of another of her dogs, Patches.

As for the snake her granddaughter came across, the girl’s mother, Tonya Maravilla, keeps it frozen in a cooler.

An 18-year-old cousin who was with the child during the encounter stunned the 5-foot long, dark-banded snake with a rock and brought it to other family members, who killed it.

“It scared the crap out of me,” said the mom after hearing of her daughter’s brush with the rattler. They were having a family reunion near the Pearl Hollow Landfill.

MacGregor, the herpetologist, offered some suggestions for parents with kids in rattlesnake country. Keep the grass mowed, don’t set a woodpile next to the house and try to keep down the rodent population, because snakes eat them.

A rattler may attack people if it feels threatened or if it makes a mistake. For instance, the reptiles sometimes see the flash of a foot on a log as prey.

But they shouldn’t keep people out of the woods, MacGregor said. Kentucky averages about one death a year from snake bites. Most are from timber rattlers and many occur during church snake-handling rituals.

“I find them to be very unaggressive,” the scientist said of the snakes.
Family keeps crossing paths with rattlers

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