PYTHON TRIED TO EAT BUB
A 4.2-METRE python had to be cut from its death grip on a 22-month-old boy at Julatten after the snake was discovered trying to eat him.
Mother-of-two Amanda Rutland was horrified to find the giant snake coiled around the arm of her son, Naish (right), with bite marks on his arm.
After mum’s desperate attempt to pull the snake (inset) off Naish failed, his grandfather Ron Rutland stabbed the python to death after the reptile tried to wrap around him too. A reptile expert says the scrub python would most certainly have eaten Naish if the family had not acted so quickly.
A FAR Northern mum found her son in the jaws of a 4.2m python in a horrific ordeal that only ended when the boy’s grandfather stabbed the snake to death.
Experts believe if Amanda Rutland had not intervened, the scrub python would have eaten her 22-month-old son, Naish.
Mother-of-two Ms Rutland believes the scrub python that grabbed her son Naish Dobson last Saturday afternoon on the verandah of their Julatten home had been stalking the boy for several weeks before it decided to strike.
Naish had been playing on the verandah of his family’s home about 2pm with his three-year-old sister, EvieBlue, just out of sight of his mum.
When Ms Rutland stuck her head around the corner to check on the pair, she noticed a strange look on her daughter’s face.
“I was talking to my mother and looking at them,” she said.
“Because it’s a pole home, and he was right behind a pole, I couldn’t see (Naish).
“(My daughter) started backing up and looking at me really weird, and I just thought ‘uh-oh – something’s wrong.’
“So I raced around the corner, and there it was: the snake was wrapped around his arm, and getting closer to him.”
The python had three coils of its large body wrapped around the infant and had bitten his right arm.
Ms Rutland said she tried to grab the snake away from her son, but could not shift its massive body, which was started to constrict, so she called for her father Ron Rutland.
“I screamed out for my father and he came running out,” she said. “He was screaming for a knife.
“My father, he had to stab (the python) down the spine.
“It started to let go, then I grabbed my son, and it started to wrap around my father – so he had to kill it.”
The family rang triple-0 and an ambulance crew rushed to the property to treat Naish.
A Queensland Ambulance Service spokesman confirmed the boy was taken by paramedics to Mossman Hospital and then Cairns Hospital for treatment of snake bites and some bruising.
Ms Rutland believed the python, which died from its injuries, had been hanging around the rainforest property for about 18 months, dining on rats and mice close to the home.
“I think it must have been watching my little boy for some time, because he’s always in that same spot, up that end of the verandah,” she said. “It was huge, honestly. “When I went to grab it, I couldn’t get my hand around the girth of it – and that was only one bit that was wrapped around Naish.
“If I wasn’t there, no doubt my son would have been gone.
“He would have been just like a wallaby to it, for sure.”
Scrub pythons are the largest snake species in Australia, with reports of them growing up to 8m long. The ambush predators are known to eat large prey such as wallabies and occasionally domestic pets. It is the second time in just over a week the species has attacked a person in the Far North, with a snake catcher nearly strangled to death by a python at Mission Beach.