Just wondering how they do it? In Thailand my friend’s dog plays with harmless tree snakes but stays right away from small cobras which wonder into the garden. Cats react the same.
Let me assure you, they don’t do that in Australia, South America or Southern Africa. Dogs and cats that chase snakes in those parts of the world can’t tell venomous from non-venomous.
I have to question how you *know *how your pets react to cobras? Do you release cobras and then watch what the pets do from a secret observatory? Because if not, then the best that you can tell is that pets react differently to snakes that they can see that *you *are afraid of! For all you know your pets could be chasing cobras all day long when you are not around.
Is that correct?
What do they play? dress ups? 
Or Hide and seek? Or let me shake you till your head comes off?
They know through a multi-step process:
Step 1: Get bitten by the snake
Step 2: Wait
Step 3: If you died, it was poisonous.
IOW, the OP’s Thai friend is on at least his 2nd dog. 
Put snake’s tail in snake’s mouth and use them for hula hoops.
I know this is GQ, but my guess is most venomous snakes, including cobras, will make some kind of defensive display before striking. A cobra will rear up, spread its hood, and hiss, and a dog would back off from such a display. The dog doesn’t know a cobra is venomous, all it knows is “This snake looks pissed and I’d better not fuck with it.” The harmless snakes probably act less fearsome and get picked on by the dogs the most.
Close. Having gone through this, step 2 is more along the lines of: suffer horrible pain and agony, almost die, and spend months recovering. Step 3 is then: learn that coiled and rattling is bad.
Now ask me how dogs know if an animal sprays pungent tear gas out of its butt or not.
Nonvenomous snakes are the nerds of the animal world.
Plus sides and a drink refill.
My ex had a really sweet dog. Half Cocker Spaniel, half Lab.
It had a run-in with a skunk and got nailed big time.
Next time it saw a skunk a year later? Went right back in for more with the same result.
Like people some dogs just are not smart and never seem to learn. Fortunately this was not a Darwinian learning moment for the dog.
Sweet dog though. Dumb as bricks but sweet.
Those dogs who know learn from their parents. I grew up on a farm and we had what you’d call today free range chickens.
Those chicks had no fear of anything, but if a hawk went over head, the mother hen reacted and from that day on, every last chick knew to take cover whenever they saw a hawk or heard a noise like a hawk.
This is why mice and rats are so clever. You can trap one, if your lucky, but then the rest of the horde learn immediately to avoid that trap. This is why when you use rodent poisons you can’t have them act immediately or the rodents learn quickly to associate the poisoned food with death and won’t eat it.
Hard to decide whether its brains are mostly derived from cocker or Lab heritage…
My mutt did this…within 7 days, this February. Ugh. We just keep bathing them and letting them outside, tho - such enablers!
If I had to generalise, I’d say that non-venomous snakes put on a greater threat display than venomous snakes. But that’s a massive generalisation. Many species of both venomous and non-venomous snakes won’t display at all before biting. And conversely many species of both venomous and non-venomous species will put on an exaggerated display.
At this stage, we have no evidence that dogs do know.
Were these venomous hawks? Because if not I don’t see much correlation to what is being discussed here.
To give a more valid comparison, where I kept chickens there were a few species of insectivorous hawks. And the chickens never learned to distinguish between those and the “real” hawks. they also never learned to distinguish between currawongs, which are highly predatory, and magpies, which are insectivores.
As anybody at all who has ever trapped mice will tell you, that is not even remotely true. The same trap in exactly the same location will catch dozens of mice or rats.
Mice are especially dumb. They sell glue pads for catching mice, and the same pad will catch mice every single night for weeks if it isnt; removed. Even seeing decaying corpses and live, struggling mice on the pad won’t deter other mice from climbing onto it.
No, that’s not true at all. The reason for using slow acting poisons is because rats will nibble on a novel foodstuff and then wait 24 hours before eating a meal. With fast-acting poisons hat means that many rats will eat a small sample and become ill, and then avoid the poison. A poison that produces no symptoms for more than 24 hours will be eaten in large quantities.
It has absolutely *nothing *to do with the rodents “associating the poisoned food with death”. Rodents don’t have any concept of death.
My experience is that dogs never learn this. Or are profoundly indifferent to it. Our next door neighbor had an annoying dog that she often let run around in the yard. The next neighbor over had an even more annoying habit of leaving meat out for the wild life. (Yes, she was intentionally feeding the skunks and coons and coyotes.) The dog and the skunks got into altercations pretty much every night for a while.
IIRC (it has been awhile) we bathed the dog numerous times, gave it tomato juice baths, shaved it and still, while the worst was gone, would smell like skunk even a month later (particularly if the dog got wet).
That skunk stuff is really hard to get rid of. Maybe there is some modern product that does it but not back then (~1995-2000…I forget exactly when).
Maybe it is a Darwinian thing.
Dogs in the wild sprayed by a skunk may be unable to hunt effectively (their prey can literally smell them a mile away).
Modern pet dogs do not learn the hard way. Getting sprayed may be unpleasant to them but their doggie drive to guard and curiosity trumps all else so any skunk that shows up is fair game.
I dunno…just guessing but I agree they seem to be weirdly indifferent to skunks considering Mother Nature built skunks with an ability to dissuade things like dogs.