We are all familiar with the story of the dragon in the fairy tales: when its head was chopped off, another one would regrow in its place. We also know that snakes with their forked tongues may be linked to the genesis of the dragon myth. But sometimes snakes can behave like dragons.

This is what recently happened with a beheaded rattlesnake, a lesson for the 53-year-old Danny Anderson.

He was feeding his horses Monday night, when he found a 5-foot (1.5 m) long rattler in the middle of his central Washington property, roughly 50 mi (80 km) southeast of Yakima. Together with his 27-year-old son, Benjamin, Danny secured the snake with an irrigation pipe and beheaded it with a shovel. After it received a few more blows, the head arrived under a pickup truck.

"When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger. I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose." said Anderson.

In 10 minutes, Anderson arrived at Prosser Memorial Hospital, but his tongue was already swollen and the venom was spreading throughout his body. An ambulance took him 30 miles (50 km) to a Richland hospital to receive the full series of six required shots. Anderson remained in the hospital until Wednesday afternoon.

"The area where the Anderson's live is near prime snake habitat. But I have never heard of anyone being bit by a decapitated snake before. That's really surprising but that's an important thing to tell people. It may have been just a reflex on the part of the snake." said Mike Livingston, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist.

"If another rattlesnake comes along, I'll likely try to kill it again, but I'll grab a shovel and bury it right there. It still gives me the creeps to think that son-of-a-gun could do that," said Anderson.

There are at least five other cases of men who got bitten by decapitated snakes on their fingers.

"Decapitated snake heads are dangerous for between 20 and 60 minutes after removal from the body of the snake," Jeffrey Suchard of the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix told Steve Mirsky, on SciAm.

Thus, you have to wait an hour before manipulating a dead snake.