Indonesian Woman Swallowed By Python While Gardening

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Central Europe may seem dead boring when it comes to wild life. The most dangerous animals are wolves and wild boar. Yet both species are shy and usually not interested in human beings. Wolves eat sheep if they can get them. Since Little Red Riding Hood I haven’t heard of an attack on human beings. The only incident I know of in which a wild boar attacked people was one I read about in a newspaper some time ago. A wild boar felt like watching TV, crashed through a window pane, jumped onto a sofa where an elderly couple was sitting, disliked the programme, bit the man into a finger, hopped off and disappeared for good. Life in Indonesia is a different thing. Yesterday a 54-year-old woman went into her garden to tend to her vegetables. When she hadn‘t returned in the evening, her neighbours went looking for her. They found a 7m / 23ft long python with a bloated belly about 30m / ~32.8 yd away from the woman’s lot. The woman’s sandals and her machete were lying nearby. The snake had obviously not been able to escape from the scene. It was too full. It had swallowed the woman whole, head first. The woman’s body was intact when villagers killed the snake and cut it open. It must have been a gruesome sight to see the dead woman with her clothes on inside the belly of the snake. Giant pythons are found in Indonesia and the Philippines. The woman’s garden was at the bottom of a cliff with many caves which are homes to snakes. If this is known one wonders why people have their gardens there. It seems to be the same phenomenon as with volcanoes. All over the world people have their fields and vineyards at the bottom of volcanoes which are still (potentially) active. An article in the British newspaper The Guardian on this tragic death mentions that pythons are known to eat small animals but that attempts to eat people are rare. Strangely, the following sentence informs the readers that last year a farmer was killed by a python in a village on Sulawesi island, Indonesia.