Page 11 - IAV Digital Magazine #452

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A Woman Went To Check Her Corn - And Was Swallowed By A Python
By Avi Selk
For the second time in barely more than a year, an Indonesian vil- lager has been swallowed whole by a python.
Wa Tiba, 54, left her home on Muna island to visit her cornfield Thursday
night, according to the Jakarta Post.
The field
was about a half mile from her house, surround- ed by cliffs, caves and a cer- tain number of reticulated pythons, the longest snakes in the world.
The snakes nor- mally feed
on smaller mam- mals. Attacks on humans are sup- posed to be as rare as winning
the lottery and being struck by lightning at the same time, as Amy B Wang wrote in a Washington Post report. Neverthel ess, just such
a horror took place on an adja- cent island last year, when a man's body was extracted from a 23-foot-long python, in an incident captured for a gruesome YouTube video.
Tiba had been concerned
about wild boars, not so much snakes, as she walked
through her corn- field that night, the Jakarta Post reported.
The pigs had been raiding the crops lately, thus the inspection.
When she had not returned by sunrise, her
sister went to the field to look for her.
She found only Tiba's footprints, her flashlight, her machete and slippers.
In the morning on Friday,
about 100 people from the village of Persiapan Lawela combed the
fields, Agence France-Presse reported.
They found the
snake a few dozen yards from Tiba's belong- ings. It was 23 feet long and
so bloated it could barely move. A
long bulge mid- way down its body had a fore- boding look to it.
The villagers killed the snake and laid it out on the ground. The villagers crowded around it, clamor- ing and crying, with some mak- ing videos as a
man knelt and carefully cut across the bulge with a machete.
He parted the snake flesh, and the result was much as it had been on the other island a year earlier. Tiba lay intact inside the snake, clothed just as she had been when she went to check the corn.
She probably didn't die inside
the snake: A reticulated pytho n secures its prey with a bite, then wraps its body around the victim, squeezing down until the victim cannot breathe, before consuming, according to the Associated Press.
At least, that's what they nor- mally do.
It's so rare
for humans to be eaten, The Post reported, that it's more common to see hoaxes.
A single photo of a snake digesting a pig has been used to falsely claim attacks on humans in China, Africa and across Southeast Asia.
In Indonesia, however, two people have now lost to great odds.
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