Before Scott started The Snake School, he worked under a popular trainer who had been doing this for decades. They used muzzled rattlesnakes. At first I thought it was so cool — holding a rattlesnake in your bare hands is a surreal experience. But as the excitement wore off, I began to see the dark side of it all.
First of all, the handlers all get bitten — more than once. At times, muzzling jobs were so poorly done that the snake's mouth was squeezed open on one side, potentially exposing fangs. I also learned that if this isn't done 100% perfectly — and since rattlesnake fangs sit on hinges — the fangs could poke right through the bottom of the snake's mouth. Considering rattlesnakes were allowed to strike dogs in the face, this was an unacceptable danger to me.
And what if the dog were to bite the snake's head, tearing off the 2mm piece of tape and being bitten inside the mouth? That would be certain death. The tape used is meant to dissolve in water — AKA humidity — and to be easy to rub off. Sometimes the muzzles weren't taken off for weeks, and I could see them wearing down, ready to slide right off during training. This was terrifying.
My final straw was when a muzzling job was so poorly done that I was pretty certain the side of a fang, and the skin surrounding it, was exposed. When I asked the trainer to double-check it and not use that snake, she refused. Instead, she actually had me barehand that particular rattlesnake during training more than any other — she wanted me to irritate it to get it to rattle. Snakes don't want to act normally when they're muzzled. I was done. And plans for The Snake School were drawn up.
Our mission was to create a safer rattlesnake avoidance training program for dogs — one we could easily make more effective by taking the extra time and effort, combined with building custom containment units that let the rattlesnake behave naturally during training.
Now that The Snake School is up and running, we correct dogs from other schools all the time. Recently, we trained 20 dogs at Studio Animal Services (who trained the Taco Bell dog), and they told us they've used several providers in the past and have never experienced such a thoughtful, efficient, safer, or more effective program before.