It’s grandad to the rescue as Chinese woman finds giant snake in toilet
Family’s cool-headed patriarch saves the day after son and granddaughter spooked by visit from metre-long stripy serpent
A young Chinese woman got the fright of her life last week when she saw a metre-long snake slithering out of the toilet as she was about to take a shower.
With no idea what to do for the best, the terrified woman – identified only as Cai from Chengdu in southwestern China’s Sichuan province – shouted to her father for help, West China Metropolis Daily reported.
Unfortunately for her, the man she hoped would be her saviour turned out to be equally clueless as to how to handle the situation, so he followed his daughter’s lead, and called his father.
Thankfully, Grandpa Cai grew up in a rural community and was not in the least perturbed by the sight of what turned out to be a king rat snake, measuring about 5cm (2 inches) in diameter, wriggling around in the ceramic bowl.
Drawing on his years of experience, Cai the elder filled the toilet with water, and as the snake slowly slinked to the surface, carefully extricated it using a stick and a shovel, the report said.
Believing it bad luck to kill a snake, the family carried the stripy serpent outside and released it on a lawn.
That might have been the end of the story were it not for the family’s puzzlement at how the snake had managed to make its way to the bathroom of their sixth-storey flat in the first place. As they wrestled with the riddle, Ms Cai decided to upload the video she had shot of the incident to the internet.
It was a good thing she did, as just a short time later, the solution the family had been seeking came, quite literally, knocking at their door.
It turned out that the snake had not in fact climbed six floors up to the Cais’ bathroom, but instead slithered two floors down from their neighbour’s flat above, the report said.
The woman who lived in that property, surnamed Tao, explained how she had seen the Cais’ video and thought she had better explain what had happened.
Tao was quoted as saying that she had caught the snake a few days earlier and planned to kill it to use in a tonic to help ease her back pain. The night before the drama at the Cai household, she left the animal in a plastic bag in her bathroom, but when she went to get it the next day it had gone.
Hou Mian, an expert on reptiles at Chengdu Normal University, later identified the serpent as a king rat snake, which he said could grow to up to 2 metres in length.
The animal was also a class 3 protected species in China, he said, and hunting them without a licence could be a breach of animal protection laws.
