Durban — Snake handler Jason Arnold had to flush out a Mozambique spitting cobra from an underground pipe at a home in Reservoir Hills recently.
The family sent a picture of the snake while the husband kept an eye on it in the garden. The picture was not clear, but it seemed to be a Mozambique spitting cobra.
The homeowner did what Arnold wished more people could do - he stood quietly at a safe distance and monitored the snake until Arnold arrived.
“Had he not, I may not have known where to look, and may not have found it,” Arnold said.
When Arnold arrived at the home, he was shown where the snake was last seen - near a door where a car was parked.
Arnold put on his sunglasses and looked for the snake.
“Okay, I haven’t been spat at so…” Arnold said.
The homeowner said the snake might have gone up the gutter or underneath the car.
The snake-catcher replied that it could have gone down the drain because there was a gap in the drain cover.
If the snake did go down the drain then it was likely to be in the pipe but Arnold decided to check the car first.
After a quick look inside the bonnet, he returned to the drain and put his phone inside the drain because the snake had quite likely gone in there.
“There it is, it’s in the drain,” Arnold said.
The snake handler put a hosepipe in the drain to see how the snake would respond when touching it - the snake remained there.
Arnold then decided to have the water switched to irritate the snake from the back since he had pushed the hosepipe past the reptile.
After a while, Arnold checked in the pipe and poof, the snake was gone.
“Alright, so mister snake has travelled down the pipe and there seems to be a bend, but I can’t make out where the bend goes…” Arnold said.
He said that if the pipe went to the left, there was another drain nearby and he thought they might have chased the snake from one drain to another - which was cemented over - but it was going to be smashed open.
After breaking the concrete, as predicted, the snake was found at that end.
From the initial drain, Arnold shoved the hosepipe as far as it could go while the water was running on full blast, hoping the cobra would come out of the second drain.
A while later, the 1260mm cobra slithered out of the drain.
“We have a nice, fairly big, Mozambique spitting cobra… and it is a male,” Arnold said.
“He looks very healthy. We’ve just gone through winter, you would expect him to have been a little bit underweight, he’s fat, a fat boy.”
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