Brave Cat From Animal Shelter Slays Intruding Copperhead Snake, Saves Elderly Owner

A pet cat, named Shelly, from the Claiborne County Animal Shelter, did something huge for its owner. It saved the elderly man's life from a venomous snake.

Teresa Seals picked up the green-eyed feline from its shelter home and gifted it to her father, Jimmie Nelson, 81, who was living alone after his wife had passed away. He had had a stroke and his daughter knew that only a pet cat can help beat his gloom. Shelly lived with Nelson at his Speedwell home, WHAS reported.

Nelson always wanted an indoor cat as a companion but his wife had never approved of bringing one home.

Seals told WBIR-TV that she was utterly surprised to see how bravely the feline jumped to the rescue of her elderly dad.

Seals spoke about the incident in detail through a Facebook post where she said, "When I met her, I knew she was the one." She also shared multiple images of Shelly at the home sitting triumphantly beside its latest catch, a long copperhead snake.

From the information available in Seal’s social media post, Nelson said he heard a sound in the middle of the night on Sept. 24, Tuesday, but he assumed it was simply Shelly trying to catch a mouse. A few days later, he was unnerved to find a dead snake under the table, "I looked under the table and there laid a snake," WBIR-TV quoted Nelson as saying.

And, it was not just any snake but a copperhead that was lying dead on his kitchen floor.

Seals said it was the first encounter with a snake in their Claiborne County house in Nelson’s 60 years of stay there.

Nelson admitted to seeing plenty of poisonous snakes slithering around his house in Speedwell but none of them ever made it inside, Southernliving.com reported.

"On the side of the snake's neck and head there were claw marks and one big slash, so we knew right then that the cat had definitely killed the snake and then brought it out a few days later to show it to her little dad," Seals revealed through her Facebook post.