National Geographic: Watch a Live Snake Get Pulled Out of a Toilet
Even if you’re not afraid of snakes, you probably wouldn’t like finding one in your toilet. Yet that’s exactly what happened a few days ago in Khon Kaen, Thailand. The video above, which was released earlier this week, shows rescuers pulling a snake out of the toilet into which it had slithered.
Brad Shaffer, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email that he’s “pretty sure it is an oriental rat snake,” which is “a large, common, completely harmless snake that is wide-ranging across a lot of southern Asia.”
Although rare, the phenomenon of snakes wriggling into toilets is well documented. Snakes have popped up in toilets around the world, including in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. According to Shaffer, they probably get in by climbing into the toilet bowl, rather than crawling through the piping. (Video: “If You’re Scared of Snakes, Don’t Watch This”).
This isn’t even the first time a toilet snake in Thailand made international news this year. In May, a python crawled into a man’s squat toilet bowl in Chachoengsao Province and bit his penis. Local rescue officer Danupol Tapo told CNN at the time that he had seen snakes in toilets “many times,” and though he’d seen cases where snakes had attacked legs and butts, he’d never before encountered one that had bitten someone’s genitals. (Unfortunately, an Israeli man suffered the same type of injury in 2013.)