A Queensland woman stumbled out of bed on the weekend to make a terrifying discovery under her toilet seat.
Jana Engler has lived in Cairns for 11 years and is the owner of Jana’s Bakehouse, known around town for its artisan sourdough, but has found herself in the news for something other than her baking skills.
After moving from Germany more than a decade ago, she has only had a few encounters with snakes in Australia and certainly wasn’t prepared for what she found.
“Years and years ago, I had one in my house and I had another one outside, but that was over a year ago,” she told Yahoo News Australia.
While Ms Engler understands snakes like carpet pythons – commonly found by residents in Queensland – are somewhat friendly, she would never want to catch or touch one.
“I certainly don’t like them in my toilet,” she said.
Last Saturday Ms Engler woke up early to get ready for the markets, when she went to the toilet and turned on the light only to discover a snake eating a rat in her toilet bowl.
“I think I was just staring at the situation,” she recalled.
Ms Engler thinks she may have seen the same python about a week before it showed up feasting on an early morning meal in her dunny.
“We were over at a neighbour’s house and the dogs were going nuts in the garden and then we went outside and we saw it slithering over to my house and up a tree next to myself.”
Ms Engler’s six-year-old son had to be up early as he too was going to the markets. Although her son, TJ, isn’t too keen on touching snakes, he is “interested” in them. So Ms Engler took full advantage of the moment and quickly got the youngster out of bed to bear witness to the situation.
Ms Engler shut the door and trapped the snake in the bathroom before returning a few hours later with a snake catcher.
“I would not have opened the door again,” Ms Engler admits. “I don’t know where it would have been.”
But all that remained in the toilet bowl was a single dead rat.
“When he [the snake catcher] came, he went in there and he thought it might be under the rim, like where the water comes out,” Ms Engler recalled. “So he was heating up the toilet with a hair dryer and looking for it, but it had disappeared.”
Ms Engler explained that the only way the snake could have got out was by going down the drain, which is probably how it got in the toilet in the first place.
“We had a look at the plumbing and how it goes under the house from the toilet. There’s this little air pipe that goes up on to the top of the roof.
“It’s been really dry in Cairns, so the rats might have gone into the pipe to drink. And the snake might have picked them up and gone after them down that air pipe and they had nowhere else to go other than into the water and then up into the toilet bowl where they couldn’t get out.”
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