A five-year-old Australian survived being bitten, squeezed and dragged into a swimming pool by a car-sized python, his father told reporters on Friday.
Little Beau was playing by a pool in Byron Bay in the east when a 10-foot-long python attacked him from nearby vegetation, his father, Ben Blake, told Nine Radio. “I think the python was expecting a victim, a bird or something, and it was Beau.”
The python bit the boy, knocked him into the water with it, and wrapped itself around a 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.
“This is Australia, they are everywhere”
Ben Blake then untied the python and tried to defuse the situation. “I’m not a little kid, I got it off in 15 to 20 seconds,” he said. The boy, now considered “a true soldier”, is making a good recovery.
“Once we cleaned up the blood and told him he wasn’t going to die because it 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 “sort of an ordeal”, Ben Blake added that snakes were a fact of life in Byron Bay, a popular tourist town and surfing mecca eight hours’ drive north of Sydney. “It’s Australia. They’re everywhere,” he said, adding that the snake was released and “the bad” went right back into the vegetation, “the scene of the crime.”
Source: BFM TV
