No thankssssss!
A monster python on the loose in South Carolina was caught steps from a local high school Monday night — and it took three brave souls to wrangle the beast back into captivity.
The python was found down the road from Mid-Carolina High School in Prosperity, with local animal lover Warren Gallman and his family working together to track down the reptile and wrestle it into submission.
“As you can see from my battle wounds, I’m about 220 pounds and it pulled me to the grass,” Gallman told News19. “It was strong. I got a few cuts on my arm.”
Reports about the beast — at least 12 feet long and around 140 pounds — first started coming in to local police weeks ago, and when someone posted on social media that they’d seen it two miles from his house, Gallman set out with his son, nephew and a neighbor to “got get it.”
After about 15 minutes, they located it near a railroad crossing, and with cameras rolling, they grabbed and grappled with the snake to corral it, ABC Columbia reported.
“Damn, he’s strong as hell!” Gallman was heard saying in the clip. “Are you pulling or is he doing it? Goddamn! Y’all pardon my language.”
The crew finally got the python into a large bin and closed the top and took it home where it became a neighborhood sensation. Gallman’s son has a pet ball python already and was prepared to help care for their newly captured serpent.
Newberry County Sheriff Lee Foster thanked the group for their hard work.
“Warren you and your friends are brave people and great Americans,” Foster wrote on Facebook.
“It is believed this was someone’s pet and it was released because this type of snake is not native here,” he added.
Riverbanks Zoo and Garden’s curator of herpetology, Sean Foley, identified the snake as an albino reticulated python and said it was not unheard of for owners to cut them loose after finding themselves in over their heads.
“A lot of people buy these snakes when they’re two or three feet long, and you’ve got a cage that’s four feet long and that’s fine for a couple of years, but eventually that snake’s gonna get 15 plus feet long,” Foley told ABC.
“You need to make sure you can accommodate what that snake needs for its entire life — and that’s a difficult situation, he added.
Reticulated pythons are the longest snakes in the world and can grow to nearly 30 feet, according to Zoo Atlanta. They are non-venomous and typically kill their prey by wrapping their bodies around small animals to asphyxiate them.
They are capable of killing and swallowing animals as large as deer and boar — and Gallman said the snake he caught seemed big enough to swallow a pet dog, cat, or even a “very small child.”
“It could cause some harm,” he said.
Gallman has reached out to some zoos to see if they can take the python. And though he has been unsuccessful so far, he intends to keep searching until he finds a sanctuary that can take it.
