Samba, a rare black jaguar hand-raised at Project Survival's Cat Haven in the Sierra Nevada foothills outside Fresno, has died after being bitten by a rattlesnake on the sanctuary grounds. Staff rushed the 14- or 15-year-old cat to an emergency veterinary clinic after discovering puncture wounds on her foot and swelling in her left paw and leg, but she suffered sudden respiratory arrest despite treatment.
Sanctuary director Dale Anderson described Samba as one of the sweetest jaguar cubs the facility had ever raised, according to the New York Post. Samba received two vials of antivenom, and lab work showed the treatment worked as intended: her echinocyte count, a blood marker of venom damage, dropped from 100% back down to 0%, according to an update posted by Project Survival's Cat Haven. Despite that apparent recovery, she stopped breathing, and Anderson said the reason she did not pull through remains unknown. The sanctuary is awaiting results from a full necropsy being conducted at a University of California, Davis laboratory, as the outlet reports.
A Cub Born and Raised at the Sanctuary
Samba was born at Project Survival's Cat Haven and hand-raised there, making her death especially personal for the staff who watched her grow up on the property. At 14 or 15 years old, she had already outlived the typical wild jaguar lifespan of 11 to 12 years cited by the University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web, though she remained within the normal range for jaguars in captivity, which can stretch past 20 years.
Her black coat made her rare even among jaguars. According to the global wild cat conservation group Panthera, melanism — the genetic trait behind all-black coats — appears in only about 6% to 10% of wild jaguars worldwide, driven by a dominant mutation in the MC1R gene. Founded in 1993, Project Survival's Cat Haven sits on roughly 93 to 100 acres at an elevation between 2,400 and 3,000 feet near Kings Canyon National Park, and shelters more than 30 wild cats.
Snakebite Was Sanctuary's Second This Year
Samba was the second sanctuary cat bitten by a snake this year, a marked jump for a facility that had averaged only about one snake bite annually over the preceding five years, per the New York Post's reporting. Staff say they relocated 14 rattlesnakes away from big-cat enclosures on the Dunlap property during 2026, part of a longstanding practice of capturing and moving snakes elsewhere on the grounds rather than killing them.
Anderson said the sanctuary, as a conservation facility, does not want to kill the snakes it encounters, and that the preferred approach is simply to move them elsewhere on the property, away from the cats. The predominant venomous species in the area is the Northern Pacific rattlesnake, a native reptile classified as such by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and active mainly from spring through autumn, which the agency encourages residents to coexist with rather than eliminate outright.
A Statewide Surge in Rattlesnake Encounters
Samba's death lands amid what officials describe as an unusually active and dangerous year for rattlesnakes across California. An unusually warm spring pushed snakes out of winter brumation earlier than normal, and the state is now on pace for roughly 20% more rattlesnake bites this year, according to the New York Post. The California Poison Control System logged 77 rattlesnake bite emergency calls in just the first three months of 2026 alone, as Hoodline reported — already approaching the state's typical full-year average of 200 to 350 calls.
The season has also proven unusually lethal. California recorded at least three fatal rattlesnake bites by mid-May, a sharp departure from the state's long-term baseline of zero to one fatality in a typical year. Beyond Samba's case, the surge has hit people and pets across the state: a Los Angeles County woman was hospitalized after an aggressive rattlesnake bit her, and the same snake then struck her pet cat, per the Post. A Santa Clarita Valley resident was bitten on the foot while tending rose bushes in July, and a victim in Oroville was bitten twice in May, requiring an entire hospital's supply of antivenom to treat.
Regulatory History and Unanswered Questions
Project Survival's Cat Haven has faced regulatory scrutiny in the past. In December 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the facility for violating federal animal transport safety rules after staff transported a six-week-old mountain lion cub unrestrained on a vehicle floor during a cross-country trip, according to USDA inspection records. Federal inspectors oversee licensed big-cat facilities under the Animal Welfare Act.
The sanctuary posted photos of Samba in the emergency room, both before and after her death, and said it performs a necropsy whenever one of its cats dies. Anderson maintained that the exact reason Samba failed to recover after her blood markers normalized is still unknown, and the sanctuary is now waiting on results from the UC Davis lab to determine what ultimately caused her respiratory failure.
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