Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1895 — AN ENORMOUS SNAKE. [ARTICLE]

AN ENORMOUS SNAKE.

Captured, After Swallowing a Small Ox, and Put Into a Cage. The colouy of Natal, South Africa, abounds in boa constrictors and pythons. While they do attack men, they are especially destructive of cattle, sheep and oxen, and for this reason parties are formed by hunters and natives to burn the bush and forest in order to exterminate the pests, says the London News. Some of the soldiers at Pietermaritzburg were recently informed by a party of neighboring Zulus of the whereabouts of a huge python that had been destroying their oxen. The soldiers, with two hundred natives, started of! to capture the snake, and having located it, the forest was fired for about a mile roundabout, an onormous pit having been previously dug in toward the center of the inclosed space. What with the burning brush and the shouts of the excited Kaffirs they soon drove the repti'e toward the pit, where, closing iu upon him, they forced him into it. The python proved to be of an enormous size, being thirty-two feet long and fortyone inches in circumference. It appeared to be quite stupid or dazed, having just eat a young ox that had been let into the inclosure. An enormous cage with iron bars half way down the front having been constructed, the snake was got out of the pit and taken into Maritiburg in the cage. Here it is kept on axhlbitlon at the barracks, and is fed twice a week, two Kaffir goats at each meal. It will not eafc anything that has already boen killed for it, preferring to kill its food itself. The goats are thrust through a small hole at the end of the cage alive, when, fixing its great eyes upon them, the snake suddenly lunges forward and crushes them in its powerful fold. After covering them with a thick slime about an inch deep, before swallowing, it battens them out by squeezing them and then devours them almost at a gulp. After this the python goes to sleep and does not wako until it is time to feed again. A gentleman in Maritzburg owns a python that has been confinod in a cage for overthlrtoen months. During this period the snake has not oaten a mouthful of food of any kind, although every conceivable delicacy of likely snake diet, such as frogs, birds, rats and meat, has been set to tempt its appetite. Its fast seems noc to be broken, and the owner has at last abandoned the idea of coaxing the colly prisoner with food. It drinks a very small quantity oi water. In a dormant state this fasting would be better understood, f6i in this state reptiles of this description have been known to exist for periods of eighteen months, or even three years.