A five-year-old Australian man survived being bitten, squeezed and dragged into a swimming pool by a car-long python, his father told reporters on Friday.
Little Beau was playing by a swimming pool in Byron Bay (east) when a three-meter-long python attacked him from the nearby vegetation, his father, Ben Blake, told Nine Radio. “I believe the python was expecting a victim, a bird or something, and it was Beau.”
The python bit the child, knocked him into the water with him and wrapped himself around one leg.
The boy’s 76-year-old grandfather came to the rescue, diving into the pool to pull him out of the water, the snake still coiled up.
Ben Blake then untied the python and tried to calm the situation. “I’m not a little boy, I released it in 15 to 20 seconds,” he said.
The boy, now considered “a real soldier”, is recovering well.
“Once we cleaned up the blood and told him he wasn’t going to die because he wasn’t a poisonous snake, he was pretty good,” his father said.
Although pythons are not poisonous, the five-year-old is being treated to prevent his bite from becoming infected.
Describing the events as ‘some kind of ordeal’, Mr Blake added that snakes were a fact of life in Byron Bay, a popular tourist town and surfing mecca, an eight-hour drive north of Sydney .
“It’s Australia. They are everywhere”, he underlined, specifying that the snake was released and that “the nasty thing” returned directly to the vegetation, “the scene of the crime”.