If the phrase “once bitten, twice shy” is true, then Jaffa the Horsham West house cat is six times shyer than most kitties.
Or to put it another way, he’s down to six lives.
Jaffa has been bitten by snakes three times in his short life.
The most recent one was by far the worst.
There are some important lessons in Jaffa’s ordeal for pet owners wary of snakes being more active during warmer weather.
‘Wobbly’ cat
Jaffa’s owner, Sharon Hughes, said she was walking with him on a road near paddocks at the edge of Horsham’s urban fringe a couple of years ago when she noticed he was “quite wobbly”.
A few injections from a Warracknabeal vet, who diagnosed the problem as a snake bite, got him back on his feet again.
Then two years later to the day, it happened again.
“I took him straight over [to the vet] and he was a bit worse, and it took him maybe a week to come good,” Ms Hughes said.
Jaffa’s most recent encounter happened on January 22.
“He had been out in our pergola having his cat run, and he came in and started to vomit, and then he had really bad diarrhoea, he was panting and drooling,” she said.
“We didn’t think it was a snake bite, and neither did the vet initially, but then the paralysis started to really set in very quickly.
“We think he got a good dose of the venom this time since he presented very differently.”
Jaffa had stopped breathing before the vet administered a full vial of anti-venom in the hope it would save him.
Jaffa was put on drip fluids and a nasal cannula, and Ms Hughes sat with him for a time.
When she left, he was quite literally hanging on for life, and she was told to “keep everything crossed”.
“I came home, and then the vet rang me and said he started to respond,” she said.
“He started to come good and by the next morning he was screaming to be fed.
“They couldn’t believe he actually survived the night.”
Ms Hughes said she learned cats metabolised venom slower than humans, which may have been why Jaffa didn’t show symptoms the first two times.
“They’re a lot more resilient,” she said.
“It would basically kill a dog.”
Snake encounters on the rise
Beaufort snake catcher Gianni Hodgson makes a living trying to prevent the ordeals like Jaffa and Ms Hughes endured.
