Python bites, drags Australian boy into pool

SYDNEY: A five-year-old boy has survived being bitten, constricted and knocked into a swimming pool by a python the length of a small car, with his father telling media, "Aw look, it's where we live. It is Australia."

Five-year-old Beau was playing by the edge of a pool in Byron Bay when a three-metre-long (10-foot) python struck from nearby vegetation, his father Ben Blake told Nine radio on Friday.

"I believe the python was sort of sitting there waiting for a victim to come along — a bird or something — and Beau was it."

The python bit the child, plunged both into the water and coiled itself around a leg.

The boy's 76-year-old grandfather lept to the rescue, diving into the pool and lifting the boy out — with snake still attached.

Ben Blake then prised the snake loose and tried to calm the situation.

"I´m not a little lad, I had him released within 15-20 seconds," he told the radio station.

The boy, who was said to be "an absolute trooper", is recovering well.

"Once we cleaned up the blood and told him he wasn´t going to die because it wasn´t a poisonous snake, he's actually pretty good," Blake said.

While pythons are not venomous, the five-year-old is being treated to prevent the bite from becoming infected.

Describing events as "somewhat of an ordeal", Blake added that snakes were a fact of life in and around the sub-tropical Byron Bay — a popular tourist town and surf mecca an eight-hour drive north of Sydney.

"It is Australia. They are about," Blake said, adding that the snake was released and "the naughty thing" went straight back into the vegetation — "the scene of the crime."