A carpet python has bounced back from serving itself an unwise meal, after a vet nurse massaged a tennis ball out of its stomach.
The snake was found in Townsville on Monday, and vet nurse Trish Predergast said they had to X-ray the reptile to confirm the object in its stomach was indeed a tennis ball and not an unusually round tumour.
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Snake swallows tennis ball
A tennis ball is massaged back up through a carpet python after it swallowed the ball in a Townsville backyard.
Using paraffin oil to make the tennis ball slippery, Ms Predergast said it took about half an hour and a couple of thumb cramps to delicately massage the ball out of the snake.
"The snake is made up of basically all vertebrae and ribs, so it was delicate because you don't want to break any ribs," she said.
"There are also major organs in there, so you want to make sure when you're squeezing and manipulating it you're not putting too much pressure on it."
Video of the extraction was shared on the Townsville Snakehandler Facebook page, and while the footage may look gruesome the snake would have eventually died if the tennis ball had been left there.
Ms Predergast, who is also a snake handler, said the snake may have been able to eat with the tennis ball in its stomach but the ball would have stopped food passing through, so it would have died from starvation over a year or so.
She said she had come across snakes that had eaten plastic eggs and golf balls, "usually left in chicken coops" for broody hens, but they were much easier to extract thanks to their smooth surface.
Ms Prendergast fed the snake a more digestible lunch on Thursday.
"It just ate a rat, I just put it back in a cage and its all happy and fat," she said.
Ms Predergast said the python would be released in about a week, once experts were confident its digestive system was working properly.
"We'll probably release it next Thursday just to make sure it [the rat] all goes through and everything comes out fine."