Mango vs The Invisible Snake

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Anyone who has been around dogs learns quickly dogs fear nothing.  They run, jump, dig, stick their noses everywhere and in anything, chase any size animal from a mouse in the grain feed to a bull in a pasture, and will even challenge the thunder.  There are no hidden spiders and bees to fear in the day or ghoulies and unseen dangers in the night.

Dogs fear nothing...except snakes?

By comparison to dogs, humans are scaredy-cats.  We won't reach our hands into a hole much less stick our face into one to see what's in there.  We don't run through fields or woods lest we twist our ankle in the hole we won't stick our face in.  Worse, we could run into a bees nest or poke our eye out with a branch.  When night falls, we turn night into day with any light source we can find.  Light keeps dangerous animals and ghoulies away, or at least in plain sight, so we can throw holy water on them or something.

Most people might argue we aren't scaredy-cats.  We know what dangers lurk out there and how we could get hurt.  Our over abundance of caution is sometimes taken as fear.  We learn early on how to react in different scenarios - either through a bad experiences, reactions to situations by others, or reading and seeing what happenes to others.

Here's a mystery for you.  How did early man learn what mushrooms could be eaten and which ones would make one very sick or dead?  At a Native American festival, a Chief answered as such: "Many people got very sick or died before everyone else learned which ones were safe to eat."  His answer raised another question, though.  When someone got sick or died from eating a mushroom, what idiot thought that other mushroom might be safe to eat?

Point of this little side note is most of us would agree we learn our fears (or over abundance of caution, if you prefer) through experience and example.  That's a good enough answer for most of us, but not for a group of researchers in Germany.  They showed pictures of fish, flowers, snakes, and spiders to a group of six-month-old babies.  The researchers measured the babies' pupil dilation in response to seeing the pictures.  The researchers concluded our fear of spiders and snakes may be innate.

They hypothesize that millions of years of coexisting with dangerous snakes and spiders translated to an evolutionary development of fear for these animals.  What they didn't explain is what the fear gene or genes look like.  Are there one or more genomes hiding behind other genomes trembling in fear? I don't know. 

Monarch butterflies are born with the knowledge to migrate from Mexico to Canada in three to four successive generations.  One could be argue what the butterflies are doing is following the milkweed as it grows and blooms in succession from south to north.  What the argument doesn't explain is how the last generation born and raised in Canada know how to return to the same forest in Mexico where their great-great-great grandparents overwintered a year before without having ever been shown the route. If knowledge can be passed on through genes, why not fear?  And what does a knowledge genome look like?  Horn-rimmed glasses?

Mango's first encounter with a snake.
She was skeered.

This is where Mango comes in.  She's one of those fearless dogs...until she came across a snake.

Mango was supposed to be hunting quail.  The fearless huntress loved to sniff frantically through the grass until she flushed out a covey.  She'd chase them a ways through the field trying to jump in the air after them.

On this particular early spring day, she stopped dead in her tracks.  She came across a snake, newly emerged from hibernation, sunning itself.  It didn't move much.  It hadn't snapped completely out of its stupor and the sun wasn't quite as warm as the snake would've liked it.

Still, Mango kept her distance.  She had never seen a snake before.  She had no reason to fear it; yet she did.  She'd snap at it, maintaining a good six to eight inches from it.  As she circled it, biting the air, she'd jump when she stepped on a twig with her hind paw and the twig moved.

She's encountered other snakes a couple of times since.  Her reaction has been the same.  The huntress in her wanted to kill the snake like she killed a shrew, mouse, and rat at other hunting excursions.  But she dared not get within striking distance of this strange new creature.  Why would she fear a snake when she had never seen one much less had a bad experience?

Mango is almost eight now and she still hasn't overcome her fear of snakes, as the video below shows.  Mango saw the snake on the side of the ditch.  The snake, an Eastern Racer, slithered across the ditch and under some leaves.  It disappeared in seconds.  After sniffing around and jumping at the slightest movement of a blade of grass around her, she gave up the search and we continued our walk.

About five minutes later, we returned to the spot where Mango had last seen the snake.  Despite what dog trainers at obedience school try to teach, dogs have excellent memories.  Mango knew exactly where we were and what she was looking for.  Her reactions spelled fear.  She didn't learn the fear from experience.  She didn't learn the fear from me.  She found the first snake on her own.  My reaction to it was to take pictures and ask her what it was.  My reaction was not fear.

Below is Mango's reaction when we returned to the spot we last saw the snake.  All my readers out there, who have a bit of scientist in them, what do you think?  Are people, and maybe dogs, born with a fear of snakes or are people, and maybe dogs, simply overly cautious when they encounter one?





And what would an article about snakes be without a song about snakes?



Posted by A Drunk Redneck