Snake Bite Safety and Prevention Tips

If you frequently hike or otherwise enjoy the great outdoors with your pet, please take care to prevent painful encounters with snakes. Bites occur most often in between March and October when snakes are most active. According to the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center (APCC), a snake bite is always considered an emergency—a venomous snake bite can be fatal if not treated immediately, and even a bite from a nonvenomous snake can be dangerous for your pets.

Here are some tips for snake bite safety around pets:

Avoid chance encounters with snakes:

• Keep your yard tidy by clearing away undergrowth, toys and tools that make great hiding places for snakes.
• Keep walkways clear of brush, flowers and shrubs.
• Clean up any spilled food, fruit or bird seed, which can attract rodents—and therefore snakes—to your yard.
• When walking your pet, keep him on a leash.
• Steer your pet clear of long grasses, bushes and rocks.
• Snakes can strike across a distance equal to about half their body length. If you see a snake, head back the way you came.
• Familiarize yourself with snakes who are common in your area. In the event of a bite, identifying the type of snake may help with your pet's treatment.

Recognize snake bite symptoms:

• Local or general swelling
• Bleeding
• Intense pain
• Low blood pressure
• Dead tissue around the wound
• Shortness of breath
• Weakness
• Renal failure

What to do if you think your pet's been bitten:

• Remember to stay calm.
• Keep your pet calm, too, by limiting his activity.
• If your pet was bitten on the neck, remove his collar.
• If possible, keep the location of the bite below heart level.
• Seek veterinary care for your pet immediately.
• Treatment options such as cold packs, ice, tourniquets, alcohol, bleeding the wound and trying to suck out venom should not be attempted in place of getting your pet to the vet—they may just waste precious time.
• Always keep your personal safety in mind and do not try to catch or kill a snake yourself.
• Even if you think a snake is dead, never handle him. Some dead snakes are capable of inflicting a bite by muscle contractions.

Contact the Town & Country Animal Clinic team at (606) 436-3446 today for more information. 

Source: http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/animal-poison-control/snake-bite-safety-and-prevention-tips

Make Sure They Can Get Home: Check Your Pet's Microchip

Is your pet's microchip up-to-date? If your pet were lost, would an animal hospital or shelter be able to contact you once your pet was found?

It's important to get your pet microchipped; but it's just as important to make sure that microchip contains the correct information in order for your four-legged friend to get home.

How does a microchip work?
The microchip, which is about the size of a grain of rice, is injected by a veterinarian or veterinary technician just beneath your pet's skin in the area between the shoulder blades. This is usually done without anesthesia, and the experience can be compared to getting a vaccination.

Each microchip has a unique registration number that is entered into a database or registry, and is associated with your name and contact information. If your lost dog or cat is found by an animal hospital, shelter or humane society, they will use a microchip scanner to read the number and contact the registry to get your information.

Make sure you can be found, too
While it may be comforting to know the microchip won't get lost or damaged, and that it will probably last the pet's lifetime, the microchip is useless if you're not updating your contact information with the registry. If your pet has been microchipped, keep the documentation paperwork so you can find the contact information for the registry. If you don't have the documentation paperwork, contact the veterinarian or shelter where the chip was implanted.

Keep in mind there are more than a dozen companies that maintain databases of chip ID numbers in the U.S. By using AAHA's Universal Pet Microchip Lookup at petmicrochiplookup.org, you can locate the registry for your chip by entering the microchip ID number. If you don't have your pet's microchip ID number, have a veterinarian scan it and give it to you.

Only about 17% of lost dogs and 2% of lost cats ever find their way back to their owners. Prevent the heartache and ensure your pet has an up-to-date microchip.

Originally published by Healthy Pet.