Black Mamba strikes again:

[Willie Barnard]

I have a farming partner/ farm manager managing a small cattle farming project I have on a patch of land upstream on the Mogol river. She is a widow, and very capable farmer. She had a Bull terrier, named Boelie, who is now about one year old.

Today she phoned me at about 09h00, asking me how long, if a dog had been bitten by a black mamba would it take to die. I thought it would be about half an hour for symptoms to appear, and another 30 minutes till death occurred.

She told me that she heard Boelie barking, a typical snake bark she said. She took the sjambok and went to investigate. When she got there, Boelie had just finished killing a small black mamba - only 700 mm long. Boelie had it in his jaws, in the middle of the snake's body, and was giving it a final shake. She convinced Boelie to let go of the snake. In the short part of the fight she witnessed, she didn't see the snake strike Boelie. She brought Boelie into the house and phoned me. She did not know whether Boelie was bitten.

After the phone call she observed Boelie, and apart from fast breathing he seemed okay. She assumed he was just out of breath after his fight. After an hour, no serious symptoms appeared, and she assumed that he had escaped being bitten.
At one hour 30 minutes, Boelie started vomiting, and now it seemed as if he struggled to breathe. He seemed to have some kind of convulsion, and was dead 1 h 45 min after the fight.

I cannot believe how fast this progressed once the symptoms started!

I received an SMS consisting of two words : Boelie dood.

Of course I am now feeling so guilty, that I didn't assume the worst right away, and rushed him to the vet! There is of course no guarantees that he would have made it - travel time would have been about 1 h 30 min.