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Hello Dawn,
My horses have never spooked at a snake that makes no noise and I, 
like your husband, have ridden right over a rattler early in the 
morning when it was cold and the snake did not buzz. On the other 
hand every time one of those bad boys lights up their buzzer from the 
bushes along the trail my horses (5 different ones over the years) 
have always swerved, stopped dead, squirted ahead, or otherwise 
reacted strongly to that deadly sound. Here is an unusual "snake 
story". This happened on a summer afternoon on a warm sunny day when 
rattlers are likely to be out and I had already heard several buzz in 
the bushes as I passed. I am riding alone downhill on a very dusty 
curvy single track that is 6-8 inches deep from lots of use. The 
trail is steep enough that rocks will roll some when dislodged and we 
are trotting but not too fast. We come around a corner and maybe 100 
feet up ahead I see dust rising from the trail and it's moving 
downhill, who disturbed those rocks? My horse drops his head like he 
does when getting ready to stomp an aggressive dog and surges ahead 
closing fast on the dust. I'm trying to get his head up cause I'm off 
balance and starting to go up on his neck and what the hell is making 
that dust? Now I'm starting to hear the buzzing and can see a fat 3 
foot rattler wiggling as fast as he can down the trail and bouncing 
of the steep sides and rolling over and whipping up the dust like I 
have never seen in my life. Of course at the sound of the buzzer my 
brave horse that had been thinking about stomping some varmint in the 
dust now leaps off the trail leaving me almost in mid air over the 
still speeding rattler but my "bucking rolls" locked firmly over my 
legs just above the knees worked just like they had many times in the 
past to keep my ass in the saddle. So I get my horse stopped about 8 
feet to the side of this now thoroughly screwed up rattler still 
thrashing downhill in the dust and buzzing and now trying to coil and 
flipping over and tangling up...it was laughable now that I was 
safely to the side. The trail flattened out some there and the snake 
shot off the trail into the bushes and continued to buzz for as long 
as I could hear it. So now I am an official "snake herder" and am 
looking forward to trying "cats". X;{
Don Huston

At 09:41 AM 2/13/2007 Tuesday, you wrote:
> Hi Chrystal,
> I don't think you'll have to worry about seeing many snakes on 
> trail.  I live in East Texas, and we have TONS of snakes here.  I 
> love snakes, and am usually watching for them, hoping to see a neat 
> one, and I almost never see one.  :(  I think I saw two in all of 
> the miles I rode last year, and one of those was a small Texas rat 
> snake laying off in the grass and hard to see.  As far as horses' 
> reactions to them, don't believe all the movies you see where horses 
> see a snake and rear in panic.  Our horses have zero reaction to 
> them.  The other snake I saw on trail was a copperhead that my 
> husband rode right over without seeing, and his horse never even saw 
> it.  I swerved around it, and my horse didn't react at all.  A 
> couple of years ago, an Eastern Coachwhip (a very fast black snake) 
> shot across the trail right in front of my horse, and my horse just 
> glanced down and kept on going.  It was just the movement that 
> caught his eye, not the fact that it was a snake.
>
> Everyone has their phobia...mine is spiders.  Uggh!
>
> Dawn in East Texas (who loves snakes, but will freak out at 
> contacting a spider web)

Don Huston at cox dot net 



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