How Briton helped catch pet-eating Hong Kong python that attacked him
Businessman who lives in city’s countryside Sai Kung district tells of life-and-death struggle to prise 4-metre snake free. I just thought, ‘I have to get its jaws off my leg’, now-smiling Karl Davies says
A rugby-playing businessman who was tackled by a 4.2-metre python in Hong Kong this week has posted a video showing the moment he returned with a snake catcher to bag the giant constrictor.
Video copyright Simon Parry, Red Door News
Seconds before he was attacked by the snake, Karl Davies had joked with his business partner about the possibility of running into a snake as they walked Davies’ pet border collies along a popular country park trail.
On his previous walk along the route in the city’s rural Sai Kung district a fortnight earlier, 49-year-old Davies had spotted the python lunging at dogs from the side of the path, and as they walked and talked business on June 13, Andrew Chambers joked with him: “If we don’t see a snake today, I’ll be very disappointed.”
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He didn’t have long to wait. “Less than a minute later, I walked past the place I’d seen the snake before and it wasn’t there,” Davies said. “The next thing – bang! – the python jumped out of the bush and sank its teeth into my leg. It got me around the lower calf.”
What followed was a frantic 30-second struggle to break free from the grip of the python, which is thought to have attacked and killed a succession of pet dogs in recent years along a stretch of the Family Walk pathway in Pak Tam Chung.
“Andrew started shouting and screaming ‘Get out of here, get out of here’. He gave it a couple of kicks and threw a stone at it but missed and hit me on the ankle,” Davies said.
“I tried to prise the snake’s jaws off my leg and punctured two fingers, and then I tried to smack it on the head with the stone that Andrew threw and that didn’t do any good either.
