Giant Snakes Invade A Terrified Small Town
Giant snakes out in the wild are bad enough. But how about just slithering down a random city street? That's the stuff of nightmares.
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I’m not exactly an expert at writing tour guide brochures or coming up with catchphrases to invite local travelers to visit a certain place. That being said, I think I know what *not* to write to attract folks to your town and that would be something like “giant snakes are on the loose all over this place”. That, I think, would be a clear stay away in the local tourism and travel department. But it’s the case with a small town in England where it appears a group of snakes was in fact, on the loose. Greenock, Scotland was practically overrun with these things.
The pictures of these giant snakes started appearing on Twitter last month with local residents showing just the massive nature of what appears to be Burmese python roaming free down city streets. These snakes were massive, with one of them measuring over 14 feet long.
It’s not totally clear how these snakes got loose or how they got out but the owner was later identified. No criminal charges were pressed so I guess it isn’t exactly illegal to allow your horror-movie, carnivorous reptiles to roam freely throughout the town. They are massive and if this were the middle of the jungle or something I think we could formulate some kind of story about their appearance. As it is, someone did fess up to having them released. Check out some of the pics that cropped up on Twitter.
Residents of the town were clearly more than a little thrown off by the appearance of these snakes just casually slithering down the city street like they belonged there. It was also reported to the Daily Mail that one of the snakes had died though no one has yet to confirm how that happened.
Burmese pythons are known to grow to be about the biggest versions of snakes we know about. on average they can group up to 16 feet long so some of these might have even been on the smaller side all things considered. And in certain situations, they can even become an invasive species which is just another reason not to be pumped about seeing them hanging around the neighborhood. If you’ve got a Burmese python in captivity, they are probably just going to feast on the standard big-rat diet. No biggie. But out in the wild, it’s a different story with these snakes sometimes just going after full-sized pigs for snacks. They’ve become a particular problem in South Florida where they are being treated hostility as an invasive species because of the damage they are doing to local wildlife.
So no, seeing these snakes on the street as a one-off isn’t the end of the world. But if they were allowed to their own devices, it could definitely become a bigger problem. It’s a good thing the owner was found and they were eventually rounded up.
