Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Rattlesnake Attack - Heads and Tails: The Western Diamondback

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Wes covers what might just be the weirdest animal attack we've talked about so far. (Disclaimer: We had a small hiccup while recording, hopefully none of you are bothered by it. You may not even notice it. But if you do, just know that it gets cleared up at around the 20 minute mark.) ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome back to Tooth and Claw podcast. I know you guys are used to hearing Mike's sultry radio voice at the beginning of these episodes, but Mike is on vacation. So this is Wes. I'm taking over for him this week, introducing the episode. Today's episode is about rattlesnakes. It's a really great episode. It's our first venomous snake episode, which is surprising it took us this long to get to venomous snakes. But I think you guys are really going to like it. It's a great story. There's a great twist in the middle. It's probably one of my favorite stories so far. I just quickly wanted to say if you guys are enjoying the podcast, if you're an Apple podcast listener, take a second right now to get on your account, give us a five-star rating, leave us a nice review.

That actually really helps a lot with Apple's algorithms. It helps us get new listeners. So we really appreciate it. Another thing we really appreciate, if you have the means, sign up for our Patreon. You're going to get some great bonus episodes. You're going to get some other cool perks. And it's going to help us continue to do the podcast, which is something we really hope. want to do. Finally, just wanted to say thanks to you guys. It's been almost a year that we've

been doing this now and we're really, really thrilled with the response so far. We're thrilled that you guys are sharing it with your friends. It's just been a great experience overall and we really feel like we have the best listeners of any podcast in the world. So thanks again. We really appreciate it and we hope you enjoyed today's episode. Okay. We are here for another episode of To Think a lot. We're still doing it. We're back. Jeff, Wes, and Mike. Yep. We haven't introduced ourselves in a while. I'm Wes. I just did. Well, yeah, but I mean, explained who we are and why we feel qualified to do this. I'm Wes Larson. I'm a wildlife biologist. I've mostly worked with bears for the last 10 years, but a bunch of other animals too, currently working with eagles and owls and a bunch of other birds.

I'm Jeff. As Wes is field tech, and I've had a lot of different jobs. He's also my little brother. Also his little brother. My name is Mike. Yeah. And I had microphones. I'm in a dispensable part of this podcast, I swear. And you're a great friend.

I got two cool stories today. One of them is close to home. The other one is slightly less, or significantly less. They're both about rattlesnakes. All right. So I try and, you know, we've been thinking a lot about what animals to do on the podcast. And I was looking back to our old episodes. There was almost like an omission that we haven't done a venomous snake yet.

Because when we first started talking about the podcast and had the idea for it, they were pretty fresh on my list. They were the ones that I thought we would do pretty early. And we're like, what, 20-something episodes in now and we haven't done one. So we got to do a venomous snake. It's time. It's well past time. Let's get to it.

Yeah. So we're going to do one. We've done a Python story, which was a bit of an audible. What do they call them on Reddit? Danger noodles? Danger noodles. Yeah. So we're going to do a danger. Somehow I've not ever heard that.

Weird. And we're going to do one that lives close to us. We're going to do a rattlesnake. And specifically, we're going to be talking about two different species of rattlesnake. We're going to do a short story on a prairie rattlesnake. And then we're going to go to a Western Diamondback rattlesnake, which is one that some of the places you live, Mike, Western Diamondbacks live. Cool, rattlesnake fact. They're actually the scariest animal.

to Jeff rattlesnakes are terrifying. I wouldn't say terrifying. Well, they were for a bit. They do scare me. Yeah. But then like when I see one, I'm always happy. Yeah, they're beautiful. Okay.

So our first story is about mine and Jeff's grandpa, Grandpa Larson. And this happened in 1965. So in 1965, our grandpa Larson, he was a really avid fisherman. It's like what he lived for to the point where he would like abandon his family to go fish. And he just would, you know, go hunt and fish. He was pretty much a mountain man. And in 1965, he had bought, him and his friends had bought five acres of land way out on the Salmon River in Idaho. And it was like a three hour drive from the nearest hospital.

It was like an hour from the nearest town, which is this tiny little town called Shoup, where really all they had was like a gas station. Anyway, it's like out in the middle of nowhere. And he had set like a really old trailer on this property and he used it as like a little fishing cabin. and he would go out there a lot and it's where the main salmon river joins the middle fork of the salmon river out by the Frank Church Wilderness.

So one day he was out there, he was fishing, he's all by himself. Again, he's like three hours from anyone besides this little tiny town where there's hardly anyone, but there's no hospital or anything. And he's sitting on the steps of this trailer and as he sits down,

a little tiny rattlesnake bites him in the thigh. And so he, again, is kind of an interesting dude. He's very gruff. And because he's just out there in the middle of nowhere, he just thinks, okay, I can either get in my car right now, drive the three hours to a hospital where if this snake really got me good, I might die on the way or I can just continue fishing and just hope for the best. Fishing was good. Yeah.

And so he just decides to keep fishing. Fishes the whole weekend. So that's an interesting choice. Yeah. I will. So the same. So on another trip to this. exact same spot. My dad was with him when he was just like eight years old.

Him and some friends were like throwing fake spears at each other like sticks. Yeah, he went to a gas station and just like met some strangers. Yeah. That were throwing spears that they made out of sticks at each other. Okay. And he started playing with them and a kid threw a spear into his eye. And like his eye was like bleeding and like he had a spear in his eye. Okay.

And my grandpa was like, well, if you're going to go blind in that eye, you might as well go blind fishing. And he took him fishing. My grandma was living. Yeah, she almost divorced him over that. So pretty much that's his mindset. Well, I'm already here. I'm here to fish. I'm just going to fish.

There's not anything taking him away from fishing once he's got it in his mind. He was great, though. Like, Jeff barely knew him. I'd only knew him for five years. Yeah, he used to always giving me cigarettes. He did actually give me cigarettes. I was like six months old. When he died.

When he died. Anyway, and coffee. So he just decides, I'm too far from the hospital. I'm going to fish. Fish is the whole weekend. His leg turns black and blue. He goes home and shows his whole family that there's these two fang marks in his leg and his entire leg is like black.

But then it just healed itself. It was just from a bruise. And we'll talk about exactly why. that happens with rattlesnake bites. But that's just kind of a funny little story that's always been kind of our family. It's pretty crazy mythology. It's wild.

But that was a prairie rattlesnake. They're pretty common throughout Montana, Idaho, some of like North Dakota, South Dakota. I think we have them here in Utah. So you said small. What are we talking about here? He said it was really small. My guess is it was a baby.

Like a one inch? No, probably. Let's just answer. I guess in like six or seven inches. Let's just answer it right now because I have, Everyone's thinking it. Yes. Baby rattlesnakes.

Not more venomous. More dangerous? Okay. But it is true that they can't control their venom. They don't control it quite as well, but they also don't produce nearly the amount of venom that a full grown snake is going to produce. So they are still dangerous. Like you should by no means pick up a baby rattlesnake, but they're not as dangerous as the

adults. Okay. Is that a question, people? Yeah. This is great. I had the question and the answer right away. I've never had to wonder. Yeah.

Some people think their venom's more potent And it's not A lot of people think babies are more dangerous Baby rattlesnakes do have more potent neurotoxin Which has different effects on your body But it's still, they're not as dangerous as an adult Just like human babies Yes

They're not as dangerous Yeah So our much longer story is about this guy Jeremy Sutcliffe Are you guys ready for it? Ready. Okay So in 1993

Jeremy's a high schooler he meets Jennifer at a local nursing home. They start to become friends and then they become more than that. And then a few years later, these two high school sweethearts, they get married. So Jeremy and Jennifer are married. They go on to have a son and daughter. Jeremy's a really competent builder. He's super handy.

He works mostly in installing heating and air conditioning. And neighbors always describe him as being very generous and he's always helping a neighbor with whatever project they need help with. Jennifer, on the other hand, is a trained nurse. She's worked in a lot of different medical capacities. In many of her jobs, she was seen as like the go-to person when there was a crisis. So she had done CPR a lot of times and she was really good under high pressure situations. In 2011, at the age of 34, they've already been married.

I'm guessing, like, it seems like they got married pretty early. So I think they've been married 16 years. Jeremy's diagnosed with Guillain Barre syndrome. You know what, Mike? I'm going to have you read that. Have Jeff do it. Yeah, no, it's French. Okay.

We'll have Jeff do it, even though Mike's. speaks French. Let's see. Oh, yeah. Gila and Barre. Yep. Perfect. Jeff in a Spanish accent.

All right. So it's a rare and mysterious condition. It causes the immune system to attack healthy nerve cells. So it leaves him really weak. He's exhausted. He's unable to work more than just like a few hours a day. But they decide they're going to get through this thing together. Again, he's 34 years old at the time.

About six years later, they moved from Kansas where they'd been living to buy a house in Corpus Christi, Texas, which isn't far from the Gulf. From what I hear, it's a beautiful part of Texas, close to the ocean. There's lots of nature, lots of wetlands, stuff to look at. So he was really happy to explore this new place. Jennifer finds a good job nearby. So their dreams are coming true. And as they're fixing this house, they're living in a trailer on the lot.

So on a humid May morning in 2018, so just a few years ago, the couple, they're trying to clean up their yard in preparation for a cookout that they're going to have that evening. Their daughter, who now has two young children, so their grandkids, were going to come by. And because they're doing so many renovations on their house, the yard had gotten pretty unkempt. So the grass had grown up and the garden was like in need of weeding and some other stuff. So at 10.30 a.m., Jeremy's out mowing the lawn and Jennifer's weeding the garden. And as she reaches down to grab a weed, she sees right next to her hand a big Western Diamondback rattlesnake. And it's lying motionless right there.

It's not even rattling. It's not rattling yet. So Western Diamondback rattlesnakes lived, as I mentioned, throughout the southwest. They're found in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and then the northern half of Mexico. They're the second largest venomous snake in North America. The first largest is the eastern diamond back. You would be scared at this point, right? I would be surprised.

Not scared. I would be thrilled. I've put my hand next to rattlesnakes before And I'm surprised No like I've seen them as I'm like climbing up something Or moving up something Just a few weeks ago even And it doesn't scare me

If they start rattling then I'm like Okay I need to get this thing some space I would like jump 10 feet in the air Once I saw it Yeah and then I'd jump like another 10 feet in the air Once it started rattling Yeah like a double jump Yeah like in the air already I jump again

Wow yeah We keep saying that like, oh, once they start rattling, one thing to keep in mind is that they can strike without rattling. They don't always rattle before they strike. They don't always even coil before they strike. So any rattles make is a dangerous. But the coil helps them to strike. It gives them a lot more reach. Okay. But they can strike at any point. And this story is really going to illustrate that. All right. So as I mentioned, they're the third largest in the Americas. So the largest is the Bushmaster, then the Eastern Diamondback and then the West. Bushmasters are venomous too, right?

They are. They live in like South America. They're huge. Western diamondbacks can grow to be almost seven feet long. They can weigh up to 15 pounds, which is really big for a venomous snake. They have a diamond-shaped head. They tend to be kind of this dusty brown color. And then they have black and white stripes near the end of their tails that leads right up to their rattles. They're pit vipers, which means they have these organs between their eyes and their nostrils. There's like a little pit organ. And that pit organ helps them see heat. So a rattlesnake can actually see the heat of its prey. Wow.

And that helps it know how far it has to strike and actually like where to strike. Like predator. Thermal vision. Yeah. That's sweet. Yeah. Terrifying. They mostly eat small mammals, but they can eat animals as large as jack rabbits and as

as small as lizards. But most of their prey consists of small rodents. They're one of the only snake species that is known to scavenge dead prey, which is I thought was really interesting. Healthy Western Diamondback rattlesnakes can survive up to two years without food, which is really amazing. Yeah, that's crazy. On average, they feed once every two weeks, but they did studies and they found that they can live up to two years without food. A really cool thing about that study too is that while they were fasting that long, they were still putting energy into like growing.

So even though they weren't feeding, they were growing. They were still growing? Yeah. Okay, so their fangs are hinged and they lay flat against the roof of their mouth. So I think that's something people don't realize when you picture a snake and you see those long fangs. You don't realize that they're like folding in when they're not biting. And then when they bite, they actually like hinge out and they walk into place. So as a rattlesnake strikes out, its fangs come out from the top of its mouth and hinge out, and then they strike with them. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. Yeah. And they're pretty much like hypodermic needles. They inject the venom really rapidly. They can strike really, really fast. That's why you got to cut open right away. We're not. Suck it all out.

Don't do that. We're going to talk about that. They can strike approximately a third. to half of their body length. So pretty far. What's the mileage per hour? I looked up, there's a bunch of papers about this. I found one that had the actual speed.

And it was in these crazy units that I couldn't really translate. The metric system? No. It was the metric system. It was milliseconds to like negative squared. I can't remember. But pretty much the thing that multiple articles, even scientific one said, that it's faster than the blink of an eye.

I mean, as fast as you blink your eye, that's how fast a rattlesnake can strike. A third of its body land. Yeah. Whoa. They're incredibly fast, one of the fastest animals. Maybe like kind of count them on a crystal where he puts his hand through the water droplets and doesn't get his hand wet. Just like that. Yeah.

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Ralph's SoCal for over 150 years, savings may vary by state. Fuel restrictions apply. C-Sight for details. All right, back to our story. Jennifer's got, she's weed in the garden, there's a big Western Diamondback rattlesnake. It's about a meter long.

So she leaps up and immediately this large snake raises its triangular head into a coiled striking position and starts rattling its tail. Jennifer yells, snake, snake, snake. Sounds like a metal gear solid reference. Jeremy hears her cries and assumes she had stumbled upon another rat snake, which were pretty common on their property. He loves snakes, and usually when he would see a rat snake, he would just shovel them up, like he'd get his shovel, put them in the spoon of the shovel, take him off the property

and release him somewhere. So he just grabs his shuttle and he's like slowly jogging over. and then he hears this rattling noise and he starts sprinting. Towards the rattle or away. Towards the rattle. So Jennifer's pinched between some shrubs and the wall of the house. Oh, she's cornered? Yeah, and the rattlesnakes blocking her path.

Oh. She's cornered, but they said shrubs. So in my mind, I'm thinking... Just go through the shrubs. There might be a bushmaster in there. Sometimes it's hard. Some shrubs are pretty nasty. It's true, but it's a rattlesnake.

Yeah. So he arrives and he tries to scoop the rattlesnake up into the shovel, but it's big enough that he's failing with that. And so finally, he just decides to swing the edge of the shovel down and he cuts the rattlesnakes head off. Whoa. So the snake's dead. So this is a human attack on a snake story.

Yeah. That's a twist. Snake's dead. She goes inside. Her heart's pounding. She calms down a bit and she tells Jeremy she's going to let the dogs outside. But he's like, I just killed this rattlesnake. I don't want the dogs to mess with the snake.

I don't want them to like bite it or whatever. So he decides to go get. rid of the dead body and he gets to the body and he sees this decapitated head it's like the head and a little bit of the body on it and he bends down to grab the head and before he even touched the ground the head jumps out and bites his hand are you kidding me so it buries its thing and injects its fangs and it injects almost its entire load of venom into his hand just the head it's like detached from the body when you think about it it it's got everything it needs it's got its brain the only thing it doesn't have it's its body yeah so

But it's a little attached to its body, right? Like nearly headless neck. He took a photo of it. Yeah, it's like its neck. Okay. So think about like if you've ever seen a chicken with its head cut off, which fortunately I have. Did you say fortunately? Unfortunately.

Their body can still run around. Their head still does some stuff. That's what happened when dad killed my pet ducks. Yeah. Anyway. Our childhood sounds really dark. With a snake, because they're cold-blooded, they have a stomached. they have a slower metabolism and they can they can actually survive for a while with their head

cut off. This snake was still functioning enough that it recognized a threat and bid at it when he put his hand out. That's so crazy. That's incredible. And it's been like minutes. It's been like 10 minutes. Geez. Wow. So he felt because all this venom went in, he felt like his hand had been hit by a hammer and he lurched his back and this head is still attached to his hand. So it's latched on there. it's latched onto his right hand, he tries to use the fingers from his left hand to pry it off, and he manages to get one of the fangs out of his middle finger. And when he does, the snake clenches its jaw again and bites back down into his ring finger. So he essentially gets bit twice, and when it bites the second time, it releases the rest of its venom. Oh, man. So this snake has

pumped its entire load of venom into his hand at this point. So they can control the amount of venom that they inject when they bite. And this venom production for a snake is really energy intensive. It's hard for them to make venom. It uses a lot of energy. So they tend to save it for prey. They don't necessarily want to use it on a defensive bite. A lot of rattlesnake bites are what you call like a dry bite where a rattlesnake bites someone doesn't really inject any venom. It's just trying to scare them off. And then a lot too are bites where the rattlesnake just injects enough to do a little bit of damage. But it's rare that a snake injects all. of its venom because it just

It needs it. Yeah, it requires so much energy to make more and they need it for prey. But if its head is attached, it's like, you know what? Might as well put it all out there. It's got nothing to lose. It puts all its venom into Jeremy's hand. So Jennifer hears his screams and she runs out to see him struggling with

a live rattlesnake head on his hand and she immediately realizes that he's in a lot of trouble. So she runs back inside, grabs the car keys and then by the time she gets back out he's managed to pry the head off of his hand and he like chucks it and they hop in the car

and they're speeding away and she's on the phone with 911 that's crazy. Yeah, you guys just thought the story was over. No, that was a dead snake. I was a double twist. I was wondering where you were going. Yeah.

Yeah. So Rattlesnake Venom is composed of hemotoxins and neurotoxins. So that's something new that I learned. I thought they were just hemotoxic, but they do have some neurotoxins as well. But it's mostly hemotoxins. So, hemotoxins work by breaking down your circulatory system and your blood, and they actually

attack the protein wall of your blood cells. So your blood cells are, you know, holding your blood together. And when they attack the protein wall, your blood gets a lot thinner, and it can actually, like, leak out of the vessels and into your surrounding tissue. So essentially, you're bleeding out from the inside. So that's why the whole leg turned black in the previous story, because it's just a bruise, basically. Yeah, it's like a bruise. Like, if you get punched and you rupture your body.

blood vessels you get bruised but the inside's where your blood's supposed to be but it's not supposed to be everywhere on the inside just in the vessels so so and like when you get bit by a snake that's why you're supposed to take off like any rings and watches and stuff yeah oh yeah we're going to get into kind of what you're supposed to do because there's a lot of misinformation out there yeah but taking off tight clothing isn't a bad thing to do so in addition to attacking those blood cells it also is going to attack your muscle and your skeletal muscle. So when it attacks your skeletal muscle, that's what leads to gangrene. And gangrene is where you have like pockets of gas in your skin and it turns all black.

People get that a lot in war, right? Yeah, gangrene's really disgusting. If any of you are interested in seeing some really gnarly photos, look up photos of gas gangrene because it is terrible. And that can happen with a rattlesnake bite. And it happens quickly. What else should people look up if they want to see gross stuff, Jeff? Rattle snake bites are gnarly.

Any ideas? When it attacks that muscle, it's breaking down the cellular membranes in your muscle. And so it's essentially just creating lots of little holes in your muscle. So your muscle is deteriorating. The blood destruction can also lead to ischemia, which basically means your tissue starts to die because blood flows reduced. Because instead of that blood, again, like flowing through your circulatory system, it's kind of just leaking out in the rest of your body. And because you don't have that blood going into your extremities, your toes and fingers and stuff can start to die. And so that happens fairly quickly as well.

Also, a weird thing is that it can trigger an immune response where your body thinks there's some sort of invader, but it actually doesn't detect the venom. And so it starts to fight the actual puncture wounds and like the wound itself. And that can cause more necrosis, which is your skin dying and your tissue dying. Interesting. So your tissue dies because of all the blood leaking into it. It dies from the immune system response. So it's really gross.

Yeah. They're disgusting. There's a lot of snake bites out there. Neurotoxic ones are typically more dangerous, but the brutality of these hemotoxic ones is pretty crazy. They don't kill you as fast, but they are going to make your skin die and your like limbs fall off and stuff. They're pretty gnarly.

That's crazy. Yeah. So symptoms of a bite include bleeding, heavy internal bleeding, swelling, difficulty breathing, blurred vision, blistering, bruising, necrosis, which again is just your flesh dying, eyelid drooping, low blood pressure, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, numbness, paralysis, rapid pulse, change in skin color, tingling, thirst, tiredness, convulsions, weakness, weak pulse, and then death from internal bleeding or heart attack. Well, sounds like one of those erectile dysfunctional.

symptom list in the commercials. Not even as bad though, because diarrhea wasn't even list. Diarrhea was always one. Was it in there? Yeah, I said it. How did I miss that? No, no, maybe I skipped it, but it is one. Oh, I did.

I said nausea and vomiting, but diarrhea is a common side effect. Yeah. Why would you skip that? How did I miss it? So if left untreated, roughly like 10 to 20% of Western Diamondback bites will lead to death. But most of them are treated. So less than 1% of overall rattle. Bites lead to deaths in the U.S.

That's good to know. So we're going to get back to our story. They're speeding down the highway and this life that Jennifer had in her mind of their dream house and everything is starting to slip away because she's seeing her husband deteriorate right in front of her. So on the phone, the 911 dispatcher is telling her to go to the spot on the highway where the ambulance is going to meet them and then they're going to bring her husband to the nearest hospital, which is roughly a half hour away.

But minutes after being bitten, he's already starting to feel the effects of the venom. And when he blinks, he's seeing nothing but blackness. So he's losing his eyesight. And he's saying, I can't see. There's panic in his voice and then he passes out. So she shakes him with one hand and then she's keeping the other hand on the wheel. And he wakes up only to pass out again. And then he starts having a seizure. So the 911 operators on the phone with her, she tells her just pull over and wait for the paramedics. So she's waiting for 15 minutes. And during that time, he's like alternating between babbling incoherently and losing consciousness, and then finally the paramedics arrive. They put him in the ambulance and they speed off and she's following behind.

And after 10 minutes, the ambulance pulls over and when she pulls up to the ambulance, they're like he's in really bad shape. We need to do something now. His blood pressure had plummeted and they're worried that he's not even going to make it to the hospital. So rather than keep driving in the hospital, they send for a helicopter, which would get him to a better emergency room within 10 minutes. So the minutes later, the helicopter's there and they take Jeremy away.

So this is really serious. Yeah. This isn't a typical rattlesnake bite. Usually if you're bitten by a rattlesnake, you have hours to get to the hospital before you even have to worry about losing fingers or something. But he's within the 20 minutes on the verge of death. Yeah, that's crazy. Again, this isn't typical.

This rattlesnake has put all of its venom into him. So finally, they get to the emergency room at Christus Spawn Hospital. It's about an hour and 15 minutes away from where he had initially been bit. Jennifer shows up, so he's already been there for a bit, Jeremy. And there's six or seven doctors working on him. They're really trying, the main thing they're trying to do is get his blood pressure up again. Because again, his blood's breaking down. There's not really pressure anymore.

It's thinner. The heart's not pushing it the same way it is. And that can lead to cardiac arrest and death. Let me like rewind you one set. Yeah. So his wife is a nurse. Did that help at all? The thing that helped is she knew exactly what to do, which is get him in the hospital as quick as possible.

And we're going to, again, we're going to talk about... I heard she's really good under pressure. She is. And she was. Because rather than run over and try and help him with the snakehead or whatever, what she did was run inside, grab the keys and get him to the hospital. Okay. So when she gets there, it's been two hours since he's been bitten. His right hand is completely enormous and swollen up.

And then there's all this red creeping up his arm. And she watches as they're like doing all this stuff to try and help him. They're like putting vitamin K in to clot the blood. They're giving them dose after dose of anti-venom. And most people that go in for a rattlesnake bite, on the high end you're getting two to four doses of antivenom. He got 26. Oh, my goodness.

26 doses of antivenom, which in and itself is a really big met. That's like a hundred thousand dollars, too. It's a lot of money. Yeah. We're going to talk about that too. Another thing, too, is they, with IVs, usually, if you've seen an IV bag, they usually hang it up and there's like a little... drip. Yeah, drip on there, and you can determine how much you want to let that IV drip into the person.

You can, like, put it on full tilt and it's just kind of running into them, or you can just have it dripping. They were actually putting those, like, arm pressure bands that squeeze on the IV band bags so they could squeeze all this liquid into them immediately. Wow. And just replacing them because... just had like an open faucet running into the bag? Yeah, exactly, because he was losing fluid so quickly and because he needed that pressure. After like five hours of working on him, the decision was made that they need to put him into a coma because he's just not getting better and his organs are failing.

So they're going to put him into a coma and put him on a ventilator. At about 3 a.m., one of the doctors walks up to Jennifer and tells her that he's not doing well. His blood pressure is really low and they just know that they kind of, They've kind of done everything they can. So they just say there's a chance he's not going to make it through the night. So she gets obviously really sad. And she goes to her husband's bedside and she grabs his hand. And she says, you find that venom and you push it out of your body.

And then she orders on the you can't die. So over the next half hour, she's standing by her side and just like miraculously, she watches his blood pressure start to tick back up. And it gets to the point where the doctors are even able to take him off the medications. and this is just his body deciding to fight it, and somehow he did push the venom out. And the anti-venom worked. By sunrise the next day, he's pretty much out of the woods. Five days after the rattlesnake had bitten him,

he comes out of his coma, and his body is like really swollen with more than 20 kilograms worth of water weight. So in pounds, yeah, in pounds, that would be like, like 55 pounds. Yeah, a little more than 50 pounds of water weight. So he's really swollen up. That'd be kind of cool. He's in just like a ton of pain.

It's raiding from his legs, his arms, his inside, and his bowels. But he looks around and he sees his entire families in the room. His wife, his son, his daughter with her two daughters. You know that scene in Austin Powers when he pees for like 10 minutes after? That's probably what happened, right? Probably for like two hours. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster.

We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com slash small business. So he did have a difficult recovery between the venom and all the anti-venom.

He had severe kidney damage. He needed dialysis. He had gallstones, kidney stones, abdominal pain. He was so weak, he couldn't stand up. And then like Jeff mentioned, anti-venom isn't cheap. And all these medical expenses weren't cheap. I thought you're going to say an erection that lasted more than four hours. So he had close to $60,000 in medical expenses, which is less than I actually would have thought.

So they started to go fund me to pay for it, which I guess is what we have to do in America now. That's so sad. Start a go fund me to pay for staying alive. And then two of the fingers on his hand were so badly wounded that the doctors had to amputate them. So his ring and his middle finger, the two, they got bit. But he was happy that after about a month, his kidneys started working again.

So he saw losing the fingers as like a small sacrifice as opposed to what it could have been. By late June, he's released from the hospital. They're back to their dream home in progress. and they finally get to have their cookout. Oh, yeah, everyone survives besides the snake. Oh, the snake didn't come back in. I, no, I toyed with the idea of telling the story twice, telling it from the snake's perspective, like, on a May morning, the snake was just sunning in the grass when someone disturbed it. And then he warned them kindly that he was about to strike them.

And then he got his head cut off. and then he decided to bite that person when he came back to desecrate his body. Yeah, I think these animals deserve representation, you know. Yeah. Have their side of the story told. You know, it's a crazy story. No one expects after you chop a snake's head off

to get your hand bit. I will say, first of all, do you guys have any questions about the story? No. No question. I have like snake questions, but not about the story. Okay, we're going to talk a bit more about snakes. But I did read a quote that I really liked.

The thing that I don't like about this quote is that it was in 1775 and it's originally about the don't tread on me flag, which has been adopted by the white supremacists and all right movements. We're not going to like glorify that flag. But in 1775, this person was talking about the flag. And this is what they said about a rattlesnake. They said, I recollected that her eye excelled in brightness that of any animal she has no eyelids. She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.

She never begins an attack, nor when once engaged, ever surrender. She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. I'd have said that wrong. Anyway. As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature had burnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth. So that to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal. And even when those weapons are shown and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible. But their wound, however small, are decisive and fatal.

Conscious of this, she never wounds till she is generously given notice, even to her own. enemy and cautioned him against the dangers of treading on her. So this person was saying like rattlesnakes don't like attacking. Yeah. And when they do, they're even going to warn you. But if they do attack you, they might kill you. And it's like you kind of deserve it. Yeah, exactly.

And that's the case. With almost all snake attacks, I don't even want to call them attacks, snake bites. It's people that are either trying to kill them or pick them up. So there's a good chance I'm going to get bit by a rattlesnake at some point. because I do like to pick them up. And actually reading the story, changed my mind on that. I'm leaving rattlesnakes alone from now on.

Good call. Not only because of how horrific this bite sounded, even though this is not a typical rattlesnake bite again, but because of how much it costs for them to go to the hospital too. It just started Goff on me. So his preexisting medical conditions played a part in... Yeah, the immune system thing, I'm sure, played a part, but also because he had had so much venom injected.

But yeah, for sure, that played a part in how horrific this one was. The reason I wanted to tell the grandpa story first is because that's a much more typical rattlesnake story. He got off really easy where he got bit by a smaller snake and stuff. If you get bit by a rattlesnake, you should 100% go to the hospital. But it is very typical that people get... Unless you're fishing. Unless you're fishing. And it's real good that day.

That's much more typical that someone gets bit. They have some pain. They have swelling and bruising. but if they get anti-venom quick enough, that's it. That's as bad as it's going to get. That's usually what happens. But there are these freak ones where you get a lot more venom or you have some pre-existing condition that you need to worry about,

and that's what happened here. If you get bit by a Western Diamondback and it pumps all its venom into you, if you don't go to the hospital, you're going to die. Jeremy 100% would have died without that anti-venom. There's no doubt in my mind. So a couple other, just real quick, cool rattlesnake facts. Their rattles are made from keratins.

of the same stuff as like hair and fingernails and whatnot. And they add a new segment every time they molt. You can't really determine their age from them, though, because sometimes they break off. But if you do see one that just has like a couple little nubs, you know it's probably a baby. And one that has a really long rattle is going to be an older snake. They detect vibrations through their jawbone.

And then they also have a Jacobson's organ, which is what we talked about with their other reptiles. That's why they stick their tongue out. It's like a chemo receptor where they can detect different things in the air with their tongue and then that brings those molecules back to that Jacobson's organ and they can process that. That's cool. Yeah, they're a really cool animal between like the Jacobson's organ, detecting vibrations

with their jawbone and those heat sensors. They're a perfect little predator. They're really, really, really good at what they do. Okay. I got a couple things. Yeah. If you stare at one long enough, you can see the devil. Okay.

Just kidding. They'd be freaking me out if I stare at them for a while. You don't like their eyes. And then I just wanted to tell this story. So I got really scared to rattlesnakes after reading Fire Starter by Stephen King. Because he puts, I've always been afraid of him. There's some movie where rattlesnakes take over L.A. And like that movie I watched really young.

So that like kind of scarred me a bit. But then like in Firestarter, he like has like mental capabilities and he puts a few. of snakes into someone's mind and the guy like gets paranoid about snakes and as I was reading it I was getting paranoid about snakes but then after that like I didn't want to be afraid of them so I found a rattlesnake once and I picked it up which is stupid but it took me like 10 minutes to like finally pick it up and you picked it up a really dumb way too I picked it up I pinned its head down and then picked it a lot of people get bit that way that's just what I learned to do it from from like a Native American guy that we grew up with.

Yeah. But then Wes was jealous that I picked one up. So then like two weeks later, he picked one up. No, no, I'm not. Which is dumb. Honestly, I do regret it. Just leave them alone. Leave them alone.

Not only is it dangerous for you, but you're harassing that snake, you know, that's clearly aggravated. I do. I love reptiles. I have a hard time not catching them and picking them up. I probably will continue picking up non-venomous snakes if they're not, you know, ones that are threatened or whatever just because I know how to hold them I know how to not stress them out but you shouldn't pick them up especially if you don't know your snakes

and you don't know what you might be dealing with just leave them alone give them their space so let's let's rank this on our ouch scale so on our scale of I think we said 10 ouches Jeff how bad would you say this attack is this snake bite I mean I'm just going to go with Six. Oh, that's six. Six. You didn't do that on purpose. I didn't.

I realized it halfway through this, though. Yeah. I'm going to six just because bear attacks seem so much worse. Okay. So bear attacks for you is like your 10. Yeah. Mike, what do you say? That's like a 10.

A 10, like an 11 out of 10. It's pretty bad. You're not only are you like in a hospital on a medically induced coma on the brink of death for how, How long was he in there for like a week? Five days, yeah. Before he woke up. It's also like a horror movie, a snakehead. I would never feel safe ever again going outside.

I would just be a mental wreck. I was going to give it like an eight and a half or a nine. Because I agree. I think like just being torn to shreds or eaten alive is worse. But your body literally disintegrating from the inside by a decapitated snake is pretty bad. So I'm going to say eight and a half. Yeah, I'll change it to a seven. Or eight.

Okay. So I think that's it for our story and our facts. I did save some facts for next time because we're for sure going to do more rattlesnake stories. So I didn't want to get through all of it. So I'm sure there's people out there that are like, oh, why didn't you talk about this or this or this? That's all we're going to talk about from now.

As far as facts go, we are going to get into what you're actually supposed to do in the categories. But let's start with our first category, which is. Our favorite pop culture rattlesnake. Okay. Jeff, you want to go first? Yeah. I didn't even really think about it much.

Just Jake the snake from Rangel. Rattlesnake Jake. Yeah. Is that what his name's? Okay, I just go Jake the snake. Yeah. Rousinic Jake, it's just really cool. His rattle noise was awesome.

He's like, fire in his eyes. So intimidating. Little knock on him for being so afraid of that hawk. Hawks eat him. Hawks, eagles, owls. But real tough guys are not afraid of anything. Oh, okay. Seems a little toxic.

He had a gun. Yeah. Fair enough. You know, you could shoot the hawk. Yeah. So I was going to do. His rattle was like a machine gun, right? I don't think so.

Yeah. Was it? I don't have to rewatch that. His rattles machine gun. If you haven't seen Rango, go watch Rango. Totally. You just changed my mind on Jake the snake. Rattlesnake Jake.

Yeah. I thought I liked him, and then West kind of made me not like him very much. And then Jeff brought him. me right back in. That's a great movie. It was actually my pick as well, but I luckily had two picks. All right. Let's hear it. So I'd picked Rattlesnake Jake. And then I also picked the rattlesnake from the movie Hard Target with John Claude Van Dam, which he's like being hunted and he's out in the like bayou with this woman. And as they're talking, the snake like rears up behind her and is like about to bite him or bite her, I think. And he like karate chops it and then punch the

it in the face and knocks this rattlesnake out and then for some reason he bites off its tail Which makes no sense and then he creates a trap out of it where these guys chasing him like shoots out and bites one of them and kills him like bites him in the face Oh man it's a crazy scene watch that scene on YouTube him punching the rattlesnake in the face is Worth it alone Mike what's your favorite pop culture rattlesnake so mine is Rattley the Rattlesnake so mine is Rattley the Rattlesnake from Donkey Kong Country too. He's one of the little companion animals that you get. He's like the spring snake you'd hop around with.

He's a rattlesnake? Yeah. Cool. I mean, his name is Rattley, the Rattlesn. So I'm going to assume. I have a couple shout-ups. Oh, let's hear it. You got the rattlesnake in hell or high water.

Oh, yeah. It kills like the brother. Yeah, they shouldn't have put that part in that. That is a little weird. Yeah. And then you have the two rattlesnakes that the guy in Colorado released in the movie theater during snakes on a plane. Oh, I forgot about that.

Yeah. Huh. So that's just, they're not my favorite, but it's something to remember. Yeah. Well, that's it for our pop culture rattlesnakes. Let's move on to our cage match. Cage match. So this is where we pair up this animal, the rattlesnake, the animal of the episode.

Let's go with Western Diamondback rattlesnake. Okay. So the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake, what we do here in this is where. this category is we matched this animal up within the weight class. Yeah. Which you said what? They get up to 15 pounds? Yeah.

So I think this is our like our feather weight. We don't really have anything else. No, I mean the spider. The monitor lizard. The monitor lizard. The rattlesnake. The beaver from our bonus episodes. And then we could put our pangolin in there too.

True. Beavirs get to like 70 pounds. Yeah. But let's say anything under 100 pounds. Okay. We'll be in this group and some of the smaller pythons too. But technically this is an animal that could take on our bigger animals too. I mean, if a rattlesnake, again, if a Western Diamondback rattlesnake decides to put all of its venom into a bite, it could probably kill just about everything we've talked about aside from the hippo.

Yeah, hippo, orca, that kind of stuff. I don't think it would kill. But maybe, I don't know. Orca, I don't think, would really even care. Yeah. Yeah. It probably wouldn't even feel it. Anyway, so it's kind of a tricky one because it could kill all of them,

but then it also could be killed by all of them, except for the spider. It's killing the spider. Yeah, so I don't really know. I don't really know how to rank this one. It throws a real wrench into our ratings. What if you put all of our animals that we've done at 200 pounds? Like they're all 200-pound animals? Yeah.

Then the rattlesnakes got a real edge on a lot of these animals. It's going to be pretty good. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like how we said if our spider was lion's-sized. Yeah, that would be the best. suddenly, you know, the scariest animal out there. Apparently, after getting beaten, I'm going to put that in quotes. It can still attack.

So all these animals will get taken by surprise after decapitating the snake. Yeah, you got to like brain it to make sure it's double tap. Anyway. So yeah, it's tricky. I don't know. Yeah. Well, great. That's an awesome conclusion we came to there.

Let's move on to the next category. Our next category is one that we've been wanting to talk about for a while now, which is what would Mike and Jeff be? do. So I think the situation that I'm going to give you guys is what would you do if you were bitten by a rattlesnake? Does that make sense that we do it that way? Or is it what are you going to do if you're encountering a rattlesnake? You know, answer either or? I'm going to answer just their situation. Okay. Yeah. You're weeding the garden. There's a rattlesnake on the ground. I'm going to take the shovel and start digging 10 feet away from the snake.

and just dig until I'm under it and then it drops down into the hole and then my wife can jump over the hole. Okay, interesting. Mike, can you do better than that? Yeah. So I'm going to go with if a snake, the rattlesnake bit me. That's my scenario. Yeah. Depending on where it bit me, I'm just going to have you unless it like bites me on the mouth or somewhere else because I don't want you guys suck it on my, my, my,

mouth to get the venom out. I'll just have one of you guys. Suck it out for me. That easy, right? It's that easy. Just vacuum it out. All right. I'm going to go into both what you should do to avoid a rattlesnake bite and then what

you should do if you're bitten by a rattlesnake. What should she have done cornered by that one? So what she should have done, she should have stayed without like a way striking distance away from the snake and let it move off on its own. So if she had a hose or something, one thing I read is a. you can spray him with the hose to try and get him to leave. You don't necessarily want to throw things at him because it can cause it to actually come toward you.

What about the husband? What should have he done? If it were me, if I were the woman in that, if I were Jennifer, I would have just backed away as far as I could, held my ground until the snake wasn't aggravated anymore, and then it's going to slither away because it doesn't want anything to do with you. So him, showing up on the scene,

he should have coached her like, okay, you know, hop over the bushes or whatever, get out of that. You wouldn't try to move it away. away with the shovel? Me, personally, maybe, but you shouldn't. Like, you shouldn't do that. Again, the people that get bit by rattlesnakes are people that are trying to mess with them or, like, capture them or whatever.

Those are the people that end up getting bit. So what I probably, what you should do, again, if you encounter rattlesnake, you just give it its space. It's the simplest, like, of all the animals we're going to talk about, this is the simplest one probably. You just give it its space. It's rattling to let you know that you're in its space and that it's actually. aggravated. It doesn't want to bite you. It knows that you're bigger than it. It's not trying to

eat you. It's not trying to kill you. It just wants to get away. That's all it wants. And you just got to give it that opportunity. So you give it at space. That's what you do if you see a rattlesnake. If you hear a rattle and you can't really see where it is, try and figure out where the rattle's coming from before you like walk around and look for it because sometimes they're really well camouflaged. You might step on it. And then also sometimes other snakes or other animals can imitate a rattlesnake. Yeah, sometimes it's just a grasshopper. A grasshopper, a burrowing owl, a gopher snake can make that sound.

There's a lot of animals that can imitate them. So just look for it, figure out if you can figure out what the snake is, and then back away, get out of the area. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time.

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Sleep number to a good life sleep. Okay. If you're actually bitten by a rattlesnake, these are the things you should not do. Okay? So first I'm going to tell you what you shouldn't do. Don't try and suck out the venom. Don't cut it open. There's like kits that they used to sell

I don't know if they still do that have like a little suction thing They don't work at all In fact they can make things worse So don't try it The blood I mean the venom goes into your blood Instantly it's a heart One heartbeat moves your blood So like unless you can do it before your heart beats again

It's not gonna work You can get it out it can lead to further infection It's bad Turnicates also are really bad Don't wrap a tourniquet around your arm because all you're doing is increasing, like you're messing with your circulatory system and it's already creating havoc in there.

You don't want to do that. So you also don't want to ice the wound. That's another thing that people say you should do. You don't want to give the person alcohol or caffeine. That's something that people say sometimes. None of those things work. None of them help. I've heard that you should, like, electric shock can help.

That doesn't help. Oh, wow. Yeah. Another common misconception, don't try and kill the snake. Doctors don't care. You don't need to bring in the species of the snake and show them what kind of snake. You go into the hospital and you say, I was bitten by a rattlesnake. They're going to know what to do.

They're going to have the right anti-venom for you. They don't need to know what species of rattlesnake it was. Don't try and kill it. They won't want it. You don't even need to bother like trying to take a photo of it. Just get away from it. You just walk in. Hey, rattlesnake bite.

Right. They're going to handle it. In our spider story, the Sydney Funnel web, they did. They did want to know. Yeah. So what's the difference? For spiders is very different. In the U.S., and this isn't true for all snake species.

There are certain places in the world where you need to know what species of snake you were bitten by. But in the U.S., all of our pit vipers are the ones that are going to bite you. They're all rattlesnakes or like copperheads or whatever. It's all the same anti-venom. You just need to know if it was a rattlesnake or a coral snake for the most part in the U.S. And coral snakes are brightly colored. They hardly ever bite people. but you go in and you say I was bitten by a rattlesnake.

Interesting. But if you're in like Thailand or something, it's pretty good for you to know what kind of snake you were bitten by. I still wouldn't try and kill it, but I'd try and get a photo of it. What you should do, you guys ready for what you actually should do? Yeah. Lightly wrap the wound with gauze. Stay calm.

Get to a hospital. So one of the things I read from a doctor said, when you're bitten by a rattlesnake, you have two important tools, your phone and your car keys. And that's really it. you're calling the hospital and you're getting there as quickly as you can. That's it. Try and stay calm.

Like if you're bitten, walk out. You know, if you're riding a bike, you can ride your bike out. You don't want to like pump the blood a lot faster than normal. But what's going to pump your blood a lot faster than normal than anything is if you get really anxious and overexcited, just calmly get out of there, calmly get to a hospital. So I posed this question to Jeff and I was a little confused at his answer, but it made sense after I thought about it for a little bit, but I asked him if bear spray would work on a spider. Yeah.

He would, like, blow it away. He said it would kill it? Would it kill it? How about a snake? Would bear spray work on a rattlesnake if you were, like, trapped in that situation? I have no idea. I don't think it would work the same way it works on, like, a mammal, but it would probably scared enough just to, like, spray and everything that would slither away.

They don't have eyelids. I would spray it. Okay. No, I wouldn't. I take that back. I would just back away. and let the freaking snake just go on its way and like live a happy life as a snake. That's the thing.

Again, unless, like, there are some of these bites where someone accidentally steps on one or something or you're climbing and you grab one and it bites you. But the majority of these are people that are harassing the snake in the first place. And that's how you can avoid it. Just don't harass snakes. What about the story of the Native American who sees the rattlesnake and it takes it across the river? It tells him that it's too cold and it's going to die. and he puts it in his shirt and takes it up on top of a mountain to get sun and then it bites him at the end.

Yeah, what about that one. That's what I'm saying. Don't pick them up. Don't pick up the rattlesn. Okay, yeah. Even if it tells you it's cold. Yeah, don't do it. Okay.

Okay, so one other thing, if you don't want rattlesnakes in your yard or like around where you live, do whatever you can do to reduce hiding places for them. So if you have like piles of boards or whatever, those kind of places make really good hiding places for them. another thing is get rid of things that might attract their prey, which is rodents. So if you have a bird feeder in your yard, bird feeders are really attractive to rodents. If you have any kind of like pond or water source, those are attractive to rodents. And then a last thing, don't get rid of other snakes. I thought it was really interesting in this story that he was getting rid of all the rat snakes because some of those bigger snakes actually eat and kill rattlesnakes.

So if you have like gopher snakes or king snakes or rat snakes in your yard, leave them there. They're not going to bug you. They're not going to bite you. And they're actually going to get rid of your rattlesnakes. That's it. That's what you do. I didn't really say how bad your ideas were.

Mike, yours was terrible. Jeff, yours doesn't really make sense, but it's crazy. I don't really understand it still. Can you go over it again real quick? He has a shovel. Okay. So you just dig a hole under the rattlesnake so it falls down. And then your wife can get out because she's cornered.

Wouldn't fall down on him, though? I mean, not if he's laying down. Okay. That's a risk. Foking holes in your time. All right. So we're going to go into our Animal Olympics, but I honestly can't think of a sport. I got, I mean, if it's like a two-foot race.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. So it's coiled up and it's just all animals are lined up and you need to go two feet the fastest. Then it wins. Yeah. Okay. What do you think? The two foot race.

Yeah. You think anything could beat it? I think there are faster striking snakes than rattlesnakes. But it's, they used to think that rattlesnakes were the fastest. How about like, uh, you know, the rhythmic gymnastics where they dance around with, like, ribbons and stuff? They could do that something with their rattle, maybe. That'd be cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Like a little choreograph dance. Yeah. I can't think of a good one to be. be honest. Maybe shot put, just like a little ball and it just strikes it. Put it on your head on its head?

Yeah. Yeah. It just throws it with its mouth. We're really reaching on these. They are really cool. I wish there was an event that was like a heat seeking or something event. Okay. We're going to skip it.

Well, we didn't skip it. We gave you good answers. I don't understand what's going on here. All right. Jeff, you got any listener questions for us? Oh, do I? Okay, so we're going to start with a couple Patreon questions. Great.

This is from Rebecca. Do male species have similar maternal protective sense where they get that burst of oxytocin? Oxytocin to protect their kin, or is it more just the female animals? From what I read, it's mostly just the females that do it. But I don't know. Okay. It's a great question. You don't know of any males that really get the oxyton.

I don't. I don't. I mean, the study that I read, they did it on female rats. I don't know. I think for most animals, males aren't involved with bringing up the offspring. So for them, they don't have that kind of protective feeling. Okay. From Ellis.

I've been watching a lot of I shouldn't be alive lately, and I've been mulling over this hardcore. Would you rather be lost in a jungle at sea or in a desert? You'd have an empty water bottle, a hat, a knife, and in the sea you'd be in a raft. That's a great question. I think I would do the best in the jungle, personally, with, like, no water. I think for some reason being lost at sea just seems so weirdly appealing to me. Really?

Because it just seems like the hardest one out of all of them. Yeah. And people that... I read that book about the guy that survived for over a year, and it was just like... Man, what a crazy story and what a crazy adventure. So you're thinking, that's a good point because the raft was my last choice, but then, like, if you survive it, you'll get some book deals and you'll make a lot of money off of it. I think that's the hardest one, so I'm going to pick the jungle.

Jungle would be the one I go for. You're just less exposed to the elements, I think. Yeah, you're more exposed to, like, poisonous plants and like. Bikes and bugs and stuff. Yeah. The desert I'm more familiar with. But you die so quick in the desert without water. Oh, not me.

Water, I think with all three of those things, the thing that kills you the quickest is not having water. And the jungle's the easiest one to get it. Yeah. But you're right, Jeff. You also find. Being stuck at sea just sounds boring. Oh, it sounds like so romantic to me.

Hmm. Anyway. Okay, so I'm going to read this one, but not answer it. Okay. I'm actually already prepped to answer it in our Patreon episode. So I'm just going to kind of read it as a Patreon teaser. Okay. So this is from Madison, and it says,

Myth that Bison reject their young if a human touches them. I remember hearing about a story from Yellowstone where people touch the baby, and the ranger said that they would have to euthanize the baby because the herd wouldn't take it back. So we're going to go into that in the Patreon episode. Wes, if you want to, like, say one thing about it. We can just do it in the Patreon episode. But thanks for the question. Yeah.

What a tease. Yeah. I know, right? We're getting good at this. Okay. So this one, last one from the Patreon. This is from Braxton, and it's for Mike. In opposition to what a bear would have to do for Jeff and West to dislike them,

what would a horse have to do for you to like them? Oh. I don't know if they'll ever fully turn that chip around. But I think one thing that they could do that would help is become like 30% more domesticated. Like if you could train a horse to use like a litter box, be a little more, you know, courteous in their behavior. You know, you'd let them inside from time to time. You'd have like a horse door that they could run through like a doggie door kind of thing. All right, from Instagram.

Yeah. So I like this one. This is from Kate Hodge. And it says, which animal would be best at baseball? That's to baseball. Yeah. Baseball is such a like facet, multifaceted sport. Yeah.

I mean, like catching, I would say, I don't know. I'm going to put crocodile in just like hitting the ball with its tail. I think it could hit a lot of home runs using its tail. A home run. You think a crocodile can hit a home run. Yeah. Hitting the ball with its day. Yeah.

You are. And a gorilla could hit a home run. Yeah, I'm just going to say like a chimpanzee. Because they're smart and you can teach them to do things. And isn't there a movie where a chimpanzee plays baseball? Oh, they should. It's what I'm sure there is. From friends.

That brings up golden retrievers. There's got to be a, he plays baseball. There's got to be an air bud baseball. There's no rules against it. I just can't wait to someday when I'm really rich to have someone bring a crocodile to throw a ball at and see Jeff's face fall when it hits it. Like four feet. Or it just doesn't even react at all.

You gotta spend a year training the crocodile to tailwhip a baseball. It still wouldn't go past it. It would go home run derby. It's not going past the second base. All right. Great question. From Miss Mia 22. She just wrote,

Pineapple belongs on pizza? Sure. Yeah. I love pineapple on pizza. I don't order it, but I'm okay with it. Yeah, you know, I hate like pizza purists. They're like, oh, you can't put pineapple on pizza. Put whatever the hell you want on pizza.

Put candy on pizza. I don't care. No. Yeah, put it. I don't care. You don't have to order it. The more pizza options, the better. A little sweet and like salty.

Yeah, I like pineapple on pizza. Yeah, that's sound you just made. I'm hungry for it right now. Really summarizes my feelings on the matter. All right, from Rachel R. Heath. Apparently, Bears Bray expires, something I just learned. I got a new one. How do I dispose of the old one?

If it were me, I'd probably go out on the first. a wood somewhere and spray it just because it sounds fun they I have a bunch of expired cance just like go spray what a rock yeah just not a rock I was picking a rock because I thought that like what would you spray it since someone could walk by and like touch the rock and get it all over it they could touch a tree yeah you're right I probably I'm rethinking my position I'm not going to go out and spray it don't spray it what happens when does it just not taste as good anymore it's oil based and so it actually like hangs out for a while it's not about taste it's not about taste it's not about taste. It's pressure.

What kind of pepper flavor is it usually? The reason that it expires is the pressure in the can. My advisor actually recently did a study on this is it starts to decrease pretty much from when you buy it. It's slowly decreasing. But after that expiry date, it's to a point where you're going to have significantly less spray time. It still is good after the expiration date, but you have lost some pressure.

So it's good to have a can that's within that date range. What's the like Scoville rating on it? I don't know what that means. It's, you know, ghost peppers, like a million. It's capsaicin, it's made mostly from habanero peppers. It's really strong. Habanero is my favorite tasting pepper, so. It actually, you should try some bear spray.

It actually, like, when it's on the ground, if you, like, spray it on the ground and leave it, bears will come up and, like, rolling it and stuff because it's, like, interesting to them. Yeah. It's when it's, like, aerosolized and it goes into their face that they don't like it. As far as, to answer this question, I don't know what the best way to discuss. dispose of it is. I've always kept my old cans and they just, I have like 10 old cans in a cabinet.

Yeah, you'd like display them. Yeah, so I don't know. Just throw them away? Probably. Yeah, why not? Yeah, that's probably what I would do. It's just going to lose pressure. And then it'll just be habanero juice in a can.

Go, go spray one of them outside just for fun and see how much pressure it has. You go spray your kids or something. Yeah. Why not? All right. Life doesn't matter. And then from K-T-M-C-L-L-N. All right, hold on.

Jeff's just going to start spelling these names. I mean, it's just a hard one. Let me see. All right, we're going to try this one more time. KT. MC Clintic. Katie McClintick. Katie McClintick.

All right, from Katie McClintick. Still can't say it. Go to Smash Bros. How would they do in a cage match? Oh, let me feel this one really quick. Okay. I'm going to say, embarrassingly enough, that I'm good with like two Smash Brothers characters and I just pick them over and over and over again.

Kirby? Which is Kirby and Ike. Nike, yeah. They're the two that I really like. Mike and Jeff are much better than me, and they both can play with like a wide variety of characters. Like going random. So they're constantly picking random characters and they're good with all of them. If I pick Kirby or Ike, I can either compete or beat them.

Otherwise, I don't win. Mike, who's your favorite? So my favorite to play as is Donkey Kong. Not a low-tier character, but my best character is Palatana. Jeff, who's your favorite? Either, I really like Pikachu and Bowser. Yeah. You used to always pick Pikachu.

Yeah. I'm the only one that stayed in the Cowards' role and always picks the same characters, though. And like... That's fine. It essentially just is a cage match every round. So it's, who knows? But, yeah, this question. So that's it for listener questions.

Cool. Okay. How are we messing things up for rattlesnakes? So they are very persecuted and killed throughout their range. People see them as a danger, as something that they're afraid of. A lot of people see snakes as like a less than animal. They see them as something that they can just kill. And that's a worldwide perspective.

I find that perspective pretty disgusting. I think rattlesnakes are incredibly beautiful. I think they're so fascinating. Whenever you see one in the wild, you can see its scale pattern and all these different things. They're just so amazing. And they're actually really important players

in their ecosystem too. They keep rodent populations down, which helps keep diseases like hauntavirus and even Lyme disease down. A really interesting thing. A recent study showed that they actually help germinate certain types of plants because rodents will eat the seeds and they keep them in their like cheek

pouches but if they actually eat them and they digest then those seeds are worthless but if a rattlesnake eats a rodent that has seeds in its cheek pouches which they often do those seeds will actually germinate inside of the rattlesnake inside of the mouse or rat or whatever and then they pass them out and they actually germinate and grow so they actually do help germinate plants they are I mean, really the main thing for me is like every animal has the right to exist. We shouldn't be killing animals because they're dangerous to us or because we see them as gross or scary or anything. That's just a really ancient way of looking at the world. Personally, I find it pretty abhorrent.

Don't kill snakes. Just don't. They're beautiful animals. They're important. So those rattlesnake round up things? I hate them. I was going to bring that up. There's rattlesnake roundup.

in Texas where they say, oh, I think they do in Arizona. We're overpopulated by rattlesnakes. We need to go round them up and put them in these slaughter pits and kill thousands of them. Look it up. It's disgusting. It's awful. You'll see just tens of thousands of rattlesnakes that are being just killed and slaughtered and skinned and all these things.

And they built this whole tradition around it. And they have like beauty queens that they crown and all this different stuff. And it's fine. Like if your community wants to have a really cool community tradition, do it around appreciating the animal not about killing it you don't need to kill them there's people who their job is to go and help you remove rattlesnakes from their property uh you can call those people you don't need to kill them anyway just don't kill rattlesnakes they're great we love rattlesnakes even when we're a little well do i love them yeah we got to get to the next category

before our final category then i spoiled it do we liked this animal jeff loves them yeah I'd say they're like a top four snake. Yeah. And my top four snakes is a rattlesnake. So overall, I'm going to put it 82. Remember, we, so we're going to start changing this a little bit just because you can still do your numbers. I'm keeping mine, I'm doing 82 overall. What are you giving it on a scale of 10 claws, though?

Yeah, let's go 8. 8. Uh-huh. Mike? Yeah. Eight sounds about right for me, too. Okay. I'm giving them a 9.

I just love snakes in general. Always been fascinated with rattlesnakes. That whole quote that we read earlier about how they warn their prey and all that kind of stuff, they're just cool. They're just a cool animal. They exist in a variety of habitats. How many snakes do you guys like better than a rattlesnake? I don't know, a lot. But snakes are like one of my favorite groups of animals.

So I just love them. I love them. Okay. So it's a nine, but you like that. a lot of other snakes more. If the snake comes up on the podcast, they're getting a nine or a ten. There's a few that are going to get like six, seven, eight, but most of them are getting nines or tens.

But rattle snakes not in your guys' top five favorite snake? I don't know. It might be. Okay. Yeah. Let's be fair. Most of the animals for me are getting nines or tens. Yeah.

But it's easier for me because otherwise I'm going to say, oh, this is my 16th favorite animal. You know, I don't know. So for me, like giving it a 1 through 10 is a much easier way for me to rate them personally. But it's not interesting if you just give everything a 9 or 10. Well, it's just I'm a very easy person to please. It's hard to gauge how much you like it. I'll let you guys know when I love, like when they're one of my absolute favorites.

Okay. My problem has been that I've said almost every single animal is one of my favorites. Yeah. You got to be exclusive with at least tens, you know? Yeah. At least, my 10s I'm saving for my. Be stringent with 10s. Yeah. But nines, a lot. I'm just going to tell you right now, a lot of animals are getting nines for me.

Okay, that's acceptable. All right. I think that's it. Yeah. That's all I've got. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks to everyone for tuning in. We really appreciate it. We're looking forward to telling a lot more stories. Yeah. Thanks again. Thanks.