I have used .38spl snake load to take out a lot of copperheads in my area of KY. One summer I killed 15 copperheads, 2 black snakes and 1 yellow timber rattler around my house and my mother-in-laws. One particular spot was drawing them in, an area on the small bridge to our road that was a rock pile covered with wiring to hold it in place and the leaves would fall in the wire and get stuck and the snakes would coil up and hide in the leaves and sun themselves and woe unto you if you walked by too close. I killed probably a dozen on that bridge and the county put a concrete type substance over it and that took care of that area and snake issues tapered off except for the occasional black snake sighting. Currently I am on black snake patrol at her house lol! She saw one in her garage and took a box of moth balls and laid out to drive him out. She wants him dead!
That summer my MIL was having a cook out and went to turn the water on behind the deck where I was sitting and she bent over and jumped back and whispered to me not wanting to draw attention of the kids until I could kill the snake, do you have your gun? Yes it is on the ATV I drove over and she went and upholstered it and circled around and handed to me and said there is a coiled up copperhead below the deck right behind you. I stood up and bent over the rail and sent him to a better place with a snake load from my Model 19-4. A couple of years later I get a call from my MIL saying bring your gun and kill a snake for me, it is between me and my pool house and I can't get back inside. Sure enough a big black snake was sunning himself right by her house sidewalk. I asked her to bring me a rake to hold him in place and the answer was come and get it, I am not going over there! I got it and held him in place and dispatched him.
My brother was going fishing a few years back and he was flipping leaves out of a john boat at the dock and said he felt like a pin hit him in the big toe near the foot as he started to go to the front of the boat to push it out into the water and start loading. He looked down and saw a copperhead coiled up and getting ready to hit him again and he jumped back and hollered to his buddy and told him he was snake bit and two other fishermen unloading came over there and bashed the snakes head in with a boat oar. My brother ended up in the hospital for a week and off work for two more. Demerol wouldn't faze the pain and he ended up with morphine to finally get relief.
I went to see him in the hospital going to church a day or so after the snake bit and his wife wasn't there yet and he said help me get to the bathroom I have to go and I got him in there and eased the door too with me holding his meds drip stand in place. I have to tell you he stinks normally, but that was the most god awful stench to ever hit my nostrils coming from the bathroom. We suspect it was his body discharging some of the poison, Lord he was nasty and I haven't let him live it down either. He says almost ten years later on cold nights at work that toe and foot still ache down to the bone.
"Rat shot will not hurt your bore...it may lead it up a bit if, unlike the CCI commercial offering, it is not encapsulated, but is easy to remove with a bore brush and/or chore boy wrapped around the brush.
That said, here in KY copperheads get the shovel treatment on our farm...live stock, hunting dogs and my grand daughters do not need to be bitten. All other snakes, get a pass, except one overly aggressive black snake that took to harassing our blue bird houses...had his head right in the entry hole in fact...I sent him off to snake Valhalla with a .22 LR solid.
City folk and suburbanites often make light of snakes, venomous or not, but don't consider the consequences of a bite to stock or people out here in the hinterlands. Yep, they're good on rats and mice, (the snakes, not the suburbanites) but....I have a couple of barn cats that attend to similar chores."
YMMv, Rod
