JOURNAL NEWS (White Plains, New York) 09 August 04 Snakebite fatal to West Harrison dog (Liz Sadler)
West Harrison: When Penny Levesque and her family went out to dinner at the end of last month, they left their 11-year-old mutt, Libby, inside the fenced yard.
But when the Levesques returned to their house in West Harrison some three hours later, Libby, a 50-pound retriever mix, did not rush to greet them at the gate, as she usually did. They called out her name and got no response.
"I knew something was wrong," Levesque said five days later. The family drove around the neighborhood for hours and searched with a flashlight to no avail.
The next morning, with no sign of Libby, Levesque called the Harrison police, who told her they had found the dog in a quarry about 150 yards from the house, she said. The police had taken Libby to a local animal shelter, where Levesque went to retrieve her Saturday morning.
"When I picked her up, she was bleeding and oozing something from the neck," Levesque said, her voice shaking. She took Libby to the Veterinarian Emergency Group in Greenburgh, where Dr. Robert Moore determined a couple of hours later that the dog had been bitten by a poisonous snake.
"We were all just blown away," Levesque said. "I've never seen a snake. I've been living in this house for 14 years and I've never heard of it."
Although extremely rare, two types of poisonous snakes — the eastern timber rattlesnake and the copperhead — exist in the Hudson Valley region, said Edwin McGowan, science director at the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, which manages and maintains 1,600 miles of trails in southern New York and northern New Jersey.
Timber rattlers, a locally endangered species, are found in Putnam County and possibly in northern Westchester, McGowan said, and copperheads are slightly more widespread. Snakes usually do not strike humans or animals, preferring to hide or coil their bodies. Most bites occur when people try to handle or disturb snakes, McGowan said.
"The chances of an encounter like this are really slight," he said. "It's possible, but it's a minimal risk factor."
Moore, who treated Libby when she arrived at the emergency clinic with two small puncture marks in her neck, at first believed she had been bitten by another dog or a raccoon, or had been poked by sticks in the woods, he said.
"We saw holes in the skin. It didn't occur strongly to us that it was a snakebite," Moore said. "But as we saw the wound change, basically before our eyes, that occurred to us and it became a stronger possibility." The wound doubled in size in the first two hours, Moore said, and tests indicated that it was a snakebite.
Though there is no definitive test for snakebites, Moore said he feels "very confident" that Libby was bitten by a poisonous snake. It's the first snakebite he's seen in his four years working in Westchester, Moore said, adding that he has also worked in Texas and Florida, where poisonous snakes are more common.
After a shot of antivenom and a plasma transfusion to help restore the blood's clotting ability, Libby seemed to be recovering on Aug. 1, when she was taken by van to her regular veterinarian's office, Miller-Clark Animal Hospital in Mamaroneck. On Tuesday, however, she took a turn for the worse, and veterinarians determined that the necrosis from the snakebite had caused a hole in her esophagus, Levesque said.
After weighing their options, the Levesques decided not to subject Libby to more tests and surgery, and the veterinarian euthanized her.
Levesque doesn't know what kind of snake bit Libby — whether it was a wild snake or a household pet turned loose in the woods — but she wants to warn her neighbors and hikers at the nearby Silver Lake Preserve that snakes may strike, even in Westchester.
"There's kids here. There's pets outside," she said. "I just want them to be aware."
Snakebite fatal to West Harrison dog