Hi ridecampers. I do not take responsibility for the methods in this story, I am simply telling the story that I heard. Only hearsay. Unflammable. I take care of a boy in the hospital and have struck up a friendship with his mom who lives in the Arizona desert, and has five horses and she can trail ride for miles. She tells me that her paint horse likes to play with the hose, and last month, the horse was found by the neighbors with the hose on, 150 feet of hose, and he had the end in his teeth and was galloping about in their corral, spraying the other horses and they were also galloping about, and nobody got tangled up. She wished it was on video, and could have sent it in for money on a tv show. Anyway, a couple weeks ago, her son told me the paint got bit by a rattlesnake. I saw her yesterday, and she told me that the Paint horse did get bitten in the hind leg and she knew it right away. She did not cut the wound with a knife (and IMO, I was glad) but she put a tourniquet on it and called the vet. He told her it was a long way from the heart, and the horse weighed 1250 lbs, and just to put Icthyamol on it. She told me that leg then swoll up in the next week, just like an huge oozing, sweaty, elephant leg. (The tourniquet was not on the leg anymore) She just kept smearing Icthamol on it with her rubber gloves, and we talked about how stinky and gross that stuff is but didn't appear to be painful. Luckily the horse did not think the snake was a rubber hose and grab it in his teeth and run around, chasing the other horses. He might have bit all the way through it, but then maybe it would have bit him in the face, maybe in the eyeball. Then they say, those snake heads can still bite you after you cut them off and you have to bury them. I don't do that, have only heard that. I have a very nice vet who likes snakes, and he promised to come catch them in a bag and turn them loose in the "forest". Just so we won't wack the rattle snakes with a hoe, or a shovel. It would be nice to have a gopher snake over here to eat the groundsquirrels. Anyway, the horse got better. Beth