First things first: the picture that I refer to in the title is on a separate page where there are no adverts. This is to satisfy the demands of advertisers which I fully understand.
It is a gruesome picture. I am publishing it on this website because it might fascinate people. It might be educational. We can at least recognise the fact that this cat would have been killed before being swallowed but his or her death would have been terrifying. Pythons kill their prey by squeezing the animal to death. How do they die? A study concluded that it might not be by suffocation which I guess most of us assumed. The truth is more grizzly.
They exert pressure which is higher than their prey animal’s blood pressure. This stops the circuitry function which over-pressurises the brain disrupting neural function.
In this story, the family of the domestic cat that was regurgitated watched in horror as it happened. The cat’s name was Meow. After swallowing their cat, it slid away under the house gate. It happened in Thailand. The snake is 8 feet long.
There is a video of this which is absolutely disgusting. I can barely watch even a part of it. The python weighed 44 pounds i.e. 20 kg. This snake tried to attack the handlers who were trying to put it into a white bag to take it away. The farmer, Chalom Suksabai, 65, had tried to remove the stake himself but it refused to go. He was therefore forced to call in local snake wranglers.
The video shows the snake opening its jaws and regurgitating the cat’s body. It’s believed that the snake came from a sugarcane field next to the farm’s home. Other pets have been lost to snakes.
Apparently, there are many pythons in the area and this particular individual was very violent. They don’t explain why the snake regurgitated the cat. I was going to speculate but I don’t think I will. The whole thing is just too nasty.
While searching for the video from which the still image was taken, I discovered on YouTube that there are quite a few videos of large pythons either swallowing domestic animals or regurgitating them. All of them of course are revolting but they are reality.
There are some grisly stories of pythons killing their owner believe it or not. In fact, there are 12 horrific stories of snakes who killed their owners. In 1966 a Burmese python killed a 19-year-old Bronx man. It appears that the snake mistook the man for food after it escaped its cage. Pythons often kill domestic dogs and cats. There are, as mentioned, several YouTube videos of pythons either ingesting a cat or dog or vomiting the remains of a cat or dog. It is very, very unpleasant.
Between 1978 and 2009, livescience.com tells me that 16 humans in the USA were killed by large constricting snakes. Seven of them are attributed to captive Burmese pythons. In the wild this particular species of snake poses little threat to people worldwide.
