Five-year-old boy rescued from giant python that dragged him into swimming pool
‘Aw look, it’s where we live. It’s Australia,’ shrugs father
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Your support makes all the difference.A five-year-old boy from Australia is recovering after his family had to rescue him from the clutches of a 10-foot python, which had attacked him and dragged him into a swimming pool.
Beau Blake was playing by the pool at his home in the coastal tourist town of Byron Bay, New South Wales, when the snake – thought to have been a carpet python – slithered out of the undergrowth and latched onto him, coiling its body around his leg and toppling the child into the water.
“I believe the python was sort of sitting there waiting for a victim to come along, a bird or something, and Beau was it,” the boy’s father, Ben Blake, subsequently told Nine radio.
“Before he even hit the bottom of the pool it was completely wrapped around the leg.”
Fortunately, the boy’s grandfather, 76, was on hand to leap into the water and drag him to the surface, saving his life, while Ben Blake throttled the animal to force it to release Beau from its jaws.
“I am not a little lad. I had him released within 15 to 20 seconds,” Mr Blake recalled with pride.
The young victim, described by his father as “an absolute trooper”, was subsequently treated for possible infections arising from the puncture wounds he sustained from the snake’s teeth.
“Once we cleaned up the blood and told him he was not going to die because it wasn’t a poisonous snake, he was actually pretty good,” Mr Blake said, jokingly dismissing the terrifying incident as “somewhat of an ordeal”.
Asked about the difficulty of raising a family under the threat of attacks from dangerous wild snakes, Mr Blake was nonplussed, answering with a shrug: “Aw look, it’s where we live. It’s Australia.”
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