Expecting a garden snake, police officer finds 8-foot python at Kansas home

When police in a southeast Kansas town were called to remove a snake, the responding officer expected to find a garden snake.

Instead, he found a python.

Officer Jesse Spencer “fulfilled the job description category ‘other duties as required,’” the Pittsburg Police Department said in a Thursday Facebook post. Spencer was dispatched to the reporting party’s front porch, where he found the homeowner’s unwanted guest and removed it.

The department shared a photo of him holding the 8-foot-long serpent, which was “adopted by a responsible individual who lives outside of this community.”

Pythons are constrictor snakes. They are not venomous. The San Diego Zoo describes pythons as “ambush hunters” that are some of the largest snakes in the world.

“They wait until the animal comes close, then a python grabs the prey with its sharp, backward-curving teeth, wraps coils of its body around the prey, and squeezes tight,” the zoo reports. “The snake is not trying to crush its prey; its goal is to stop its potential meal from breathing. After that, the python unfolds its flexible jaw, opens wide, and swallows its prey whole — usually head first — flexing and contracting its muscles to move the meal down its throat and into its stomach.”

Pythons are not native to North America, but have become an invasive species in Florida, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. While rare, captive constrictor snakes have killed children and adults in homes where the snakes were kept as exotic pets. However, there have been no human deaths reported from wild pythons.

Wildlife officials have said owners have been known to dump pythons in the wild when the pets get too big to handle, the Associated Press reported in 2015 after a 15-foot-long, 160-pound Burmese python was found in rural Missouri.

This story was originally published June 24, 2021 at 2:51 PM.