In fact, sucking the venom out works very poorly, if at all, because the venom is injected fairly deep under pressure. Unlike a puncture wound (step on a nail, etc) where a bit of bleeding is actually helpful to cleanse the wound, it doesn’t help any for a bite, because the venom is already spread out into the surrounding tissue. And cutting little X’s just makes the injury worse.

The current thinking is to minimize the spread of venom as much as possible by keeping the limb in question lowered, keep the victim’s pulse rate down (which is the biggest challenge), and get them to a hospital. Anti-venom may or may not enter into it – in many cases, the anti-venom isn’t already at the hospital (due to short shelf life, etc), and by the time it is obtained, it’s too late to do much good.

So as a practical matter, if you get bit when you’re 12 or 15 hours hike away from the trailhead, you’re looking at a *really* crappy 12-15 hours (or more) of symptomatic treatment using whatever is in the first aid kit – and most of the *useful* stuff at that point is prescription-only and not available to most hikers.

And incidentally, most people *vastly* underestimate the effort needed to bring somebody down off a trail. There’s a popular destination on the Appalachian Trail near here called Dragon’s Tooth, only 3 1/2 miles from the nearest trailhead. They had an incident a few years ago somebody did a stupid and ended up in a Stokes basket. Took 60 people to get him off the mountain.

Yes, 60. Not a typo. You get tired *fast* under those conditions, each team of carriers had to swap out after only a few hundred yards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Litter_rescue_basket.jpg

Now I’m going to use the flashlight to hypnotize the feces. Remain very still. At the proper moment, I shall spring into action and fling you across the tent to safety.

Given that sort of outcome, I’m willing to forgive them a bit of hype.

I think George’s friends should ask himself what the connecting factor is in all those animal “attacks”. Who knows how many bestial rapes George got away with when they’d previously bought other brands of batteries.

Skip

Anyway, I’m interested in knowing whether this is actually a valid defense against snakes. Do they actually follow bright lights? It seems unlikely to me, but I know little about snakes.

“… to reveal a big, deadly copperhead, coiled to strike where no first-aid could have saved me”

Hmm… I’m guessing that must be where any serious, self-respecting 1936 American male wouldn’t have dared to put his mouth on and suck the venom out

@zikman since the story is in past tense, ‘lay’ is more correct, although it seems to be falling out of use these days (heavy sigh for the devolution of language).