Skip to footer

Mom rescues baby from python: Finds six-foot snake in bed

An Australian mom rescues her baby from a six-foot python that had curled up in bed with the two of them during the night: A cat's hiss warns her, and her cellphone light helps her see the culprit.

|
Associated Press
Australian mom rescues her baby girl from a python that crawled into her bed during the night.
  • By Staff

When she went to bed Jan. 4, Australian mom Tess Guthrie curled up next to her 2-year-old daughter Zara as usual – not expecting to wake up a heroine in the morning.

Before dawn she heard her cat hissing ­– but thought it was normal, she told the Brisbane Times, because the cat had been acting up recently. But when she looked on the bed at where she put her daughter to sleep, she saw an odd form writhing around.  

Grabbing her mobile phone to shine some light on the bed, she saw the uninimaginable: curled around the arm of her daughter was a six-foot-long python, according to the Times.

Apparently, after the snake saw Ms. Guthrie, it began constricting around Zara’s arm and started to strike at her. Guthrie thought the python was going to kill her daughter, and maternal instinct took over.

“… on the third time [it was biting down on her] I grabbed the snake on the head. I pulled her and the snake apart from each other,” Guthrie told the newspaper. Then, she said, with her child in one arm, Guthrie whipped the snake across the room and dashed outside.

Guthrie and Zara arrived at a nearby hospital via ambulance and stayed the night while the bites were being treated.

To understand the snake’s side of the story, the Brisbane Times spoke with Tex’s Snake Removals’ Tex Tillis. Tillis removed the six-foot python from the house and said it did not want to eat Zara, just wanted to “hug” her. 

“That snake, if it was bigger, could have crushed the baby. It could have tried to eat the baby, yes,” he said.

Only once it felt threatened by Guthrie did the python enter attack mode.

Though Guthrie described her discovery as a “shock,” pythons are native to Australia.

Coincidentally, here in the US, which has no native pythons,  the great 2013 Python Challenge starts this week. Sponsored by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, the one-month open season on Burmese pythons in Florida is aimed at thinning the burgeoning population of pythons in the wild. These pythons were released either deliberately  or accidentally  by exotic pet dealers – and possibly disillusioned pet owners – and they are classified legally as an invasive species that threaten the  Everglades ecosystem.

On Dec. 30,  United Press International reported, a 17-foot Burmese python scared a family when it slithered into a picnic area near Orlando, Fla. and caught it on camera before it was killed by a park ranger.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Mom rescues baby from python: Finds six-foot snake in bed
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2013/0107/Mom-rescues-baby-from-python-Finds-six-foot-snake-in-bed
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe