My heart says 'no' and my reality is 'yes'.
We have 64 acres in eastern Oregon. Big rattlesnake country. Not evil, nasty rattlesnakes that would sooner kill you than warn you, but rattlesnakes none the less. Some years are snake years while other years aren't. That's how they breed.
The older grandkids know the sound. The younger ones don't. When my own kids were little they didn't know the sound until they were old enough. When they were old enough to know the sound, they thought they were old enough to wrangle them. Wrong. Call someone? Ummm, even if we had a phone out there, the closest rancher would come with his .22.
If a rattler comes into the homestead, we shoot it. They return to the same place to breed, so relocation is kind of a drag. If the kids are out of the homestead area, then they are with adults and when we run across a snake (or vice-versa) the snake gets left alone.
It's just that simple for us. We're almost 2 hours from the closest hospital and doctor. We won't take a chance with one of the kids being bit. We give our dogs the rattlesnake vaccine each May; they don't make them for humans!!
Rattler bites are a drag and cause pain and sickness, hospital and fluids, and it's a real drag. I don't advocate the killing of animals nor do I advocate the harming of children. We do the best we can out there to respect the environment and all the critters in it, and sometimes that means we need to kill something to protect something else. It's just a reality.
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