Chihuahua saves boy from rattlesnake

Dog takes bites meant for 1-year-old, survives to prance with pride

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Chihuahua saves baby from rattlesnake
July 23: A 1-year-old Chihuahua named "Zoey" is bit protecting a baby from a rattlesnake. KUSA's Anastasiya Bolton reports.

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updated 12:09 p.m. ET July 23, 2007

MASONVILLE, Colo. - Zoey is a Chihuahua, but when a rattlesnake lunged at her owners’ 1-year-old grandson, she was a real bulldog.

Booker West was splashing his hands in a birdbath in his grandparents’ northern Colorado back yard when the snake slithered up to the toddler, rattled and struck. Five-pound Zoey jumped in the way and took the bites.

“She got in between Booker and the snake, and that’s when I heard her yipe,” Monty Long, the boy’s grandfather, said Thursday.

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The dog required treatment and for a time it appeared she might not survive. Now she prances about.

“These little bitty dogs, they just don’t really get credit,” Booker’s grandma Denise Long told the Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald.