Nature
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The midnight toilet dash is a stressful one indeed. Bleary-eyed and disoriented, you run the risk of treading on stray Lego cubes and colliding with other seemingly innocuous household items which hold the upper hand when you’re groggy and dying for a p*ss. Just to make your late-night lavatory escapades all the more anxiety-inducing, today we bring you a tale of toilet trauma fresh from your nightmares.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Our story takes place in Austria, where a 65-year-old man made his way to the bathroom at 6 am for some light relief. Unfortunately, his visit was nipped quite literally in the bud as an intruder bit his genitals from below. The culprit: a 1.6-meter (5.25-foot) albino reticulated python.
Receiving a snakebite to the nether regions is a shudder-worthy enough concept at the best of times, but to be so cruelly attacked in such a vulnerable state must be quite the wake-up call indeed. According to a report from AP, the victim is said to have “felt a ‘nip’ in the genital area,” after sitting on the toilet. It wasn’t until he stood up to investigate the scene of the crime that he saw the enormous snake.
The snake in question, who no doubt wasn’t particularly thrilled by the run in themselves, is alleged to have escaped from a neighbor’s apartment. The 24-year-old next door apparently didn’t notice the snake had gone missing among his collection of 11 non-venomous constrictor snakes and a gecko nor could explain how it reached his neighbor’s toilet. One nightmare-fuel theory is that the snake may have slithered through the drains and been in the process of creeping back out of the toilet when it met an obstacle and subsequently bit the man’s behind.
There are several ways a snake can wind up in your toilet, but the most likely is that they have entered the property through a window or door and sought out a suitable watering hole. That said, it is possible for snakes to enter your homes via the sewers, places they may be drawn to due to their association with yummy rats. Their flexible bodies are well adapted to slithering through the S-bend of a toilet and unfortunately, this report is by no means the first of its kind.
In Brisbane, Australia, in 2019 a woman visiting the toilet met a similar fate at the fangs of a carpet python. The bitee called for help from Snakes Catchers of Brisbane and & Gold Coast who wrote in a Facebook post that she was able to see the funny side of what they termed a “CHEEKY VISITOR” despite receiving some puncture wounds to the butt.
“While we don't catch snakes in toilets every single day, it is quite a regular occurrence,” they wrote in the post. So, what’s one to do when they find a snake in the loo?
“Don't poke and prod it, don't continue to flush the toilet. If you do these things it increases the chances of us not being able to access the snake if it retreats further into the pipe. Put the lid down, secure it, and call a snake catcher.”
[H/T: The Independent]
