About six weeks ago, I heard the familiar bark of my dog coming from the lawn outside the kitchen window.
Billie — a border-collie blue-cattle-dog cross — has a really distinct bark when she's rounded up a snake.
It's one loud, singular bark, repeated each time she jumps toward the snake and then lunges back to avoid its strike.
We live on the outskirts of Brisbane's west, surrounded by thick bushland, and I've been hearing that bark a lot lately.
A few nights before, she'd cornered a brown tree-snake under the house. That time I'd managed to grab her, giving the snake a chance to get away. Two weeks before that it was a similar story with a green tree-snake.
But as I took the two steps down from the deck into the yard, a big eastern brown snake was reared back and striking repeatedly, clearly distressed by the barking dog in its face.
Out of instinct, I called to Billie to leave the snake alone.
Distracted, she turned to me as the snake struck again.
It narrowly missed, but then I was unsure what to do: if I called to her again, the distraction might leave her open to getting bitten.
If I left her, she was still in danger of killing the snake and getting bitten in the process.
https://tinyurl.com/uoq5okl
Interesting article as snakes and dogs are abundant in both countries