Snake found in Changhua home toilet

Snakes end their hibernation and start feeding shortly after Tomb-Sweeping Day, which fell on April 5 this year.

They are so active as the days get longer and warmer in summer that at least a couple of them lay in wait for prey in flush toilet bowls in rural southern Taiwan.

One of them was caught at Puli, near Wushe where Atayal braves attacked and killed scores of Japanese in 1931. It bit the occupant of the toilet bowl.

Another occupant in Fengyuan, south of Changhua, was luckier.

A farmer's wife wasn't bitten by a king ratsnake yesterday. Mrs. Lin dialed 119 in the morning, a Fengyuan fire squad leader said.

“She told us there's a snake in her toilet bowl,” the squad leader said. So he went to her home with a fireman to have a look.

There wasn't any snake there, when they checked up on the bathroom. The squad leader flushed the toilet anyway and went out of the house to find if the reptile was flushed out.

He found no reptile in the open septic pond to which the waste is flushed through a pipe.

So he went back to the bathroom, lying in wait for the serpent.

It surfaced in a quarter of an hour.

The king ratsnake (Elaphe carinata) the fire squad leader caught with his snake-catcher measured 1.5 meters from nose to tail. It's non-poisonous.

And it took him only five minutes to release the ratsnake to the wild, hoping that it won't come back.

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