Python That Ate 100 Chickens and Ducks Captured After Terrorizing Farm

A 13-foot-long python that had been gorging itself on more than 100 chickens and ducks has finally been caught, much to the farmer's relief.

The snake had been stealing poultry from 58-year-old Chaiwichit Sarito, who owns a farm in Udon Thani, Thailand. The farmer was mystified at the disappearances of large numbers of his chickens and ducks over the past few days, and had also found the birds' eggs being taken or damaged.

Having initially suspected the neighbor's dog, Sarito came face to face with the true culprit on Tuesday when he entered the bird coop and found the massive python hanging from the roof, local news the Thaiger reported.

He called Udon Thani's Sawang Metta Thammasat Rescue Unit, which attended the scene at about 10 p.m. local time that evening, capturing the beast.

There are three types of pythons native to Thailand: reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons and Brongersma's blood pythons.

Reticulated pythons are the longest snakes in the world, often growing to lengths of up to 21 feet, while Burmese pythons generally reach about 12 to 16 feet long, according to Thai National Parks. Brongersma's blood pythons are the smallest of the Thai pythons, growing to roughly 2 to 6 feet long.

Therefore, the python inside Sarito's bird coop was likely a reticulated python but might have been a larger Burmese python. After capture, it was released back into the wild unharmed, but far away from any chickens or ducks that it can snack on.

Pythons are non-venomous snakes, killing their prey not by injecting them with venom via sharp fangs but by squeezing them to death. The snakes will wind themselves around their victim to the point of suffocation before unhinging their jaws and swallowing the prey whole, even if it's wider than their head,

Reticulated and Burmese pythons typically feed on smaller mammals like rats and mice but will also eat poultry and other birds if they can get them. Larger specimens of both species will eat much larger prey, ranging from primates and pigs to deer and alligators, and even, occasionally, humans.

Burmese pythons in the wild in Asia are listed as "vulnerable" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, with their population having declined about 30 percent between 2000 and 2010, mostly due to habitat loss and over-harvesting.

Populations that live in Florida, however, are considered invasive species due to their numbers having rapidly exploded since they arrived in the 1970s. There are thought to possibly be hundreds of thousands of the pythons in Florida's Everglades, and are destructive to the native species of the state, both by eating them as prey or outcompeting them as predators.

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