- Please don’t take these stories as an endorsement of getting drunk and picking fights with snakes.
What happens if a lethally venomous snake sinks its teeth into your flesh? Well, you’ll either get yourself into a hospital post-haste or you start hanging wings on your back.
That is, unless you’re so drunk that you don’t give a hoot or a holler about some extra poison in your body. And you kill the snake for the audacity to attack you.
That’s exactly what happened in two recent bizarre incidents. In both India and Croatia, a local drunkard was attacked by a snake, only to turn the tables on the slithering fiend.
The Indian case saw our intoxicated hero give what he got. After the snake bit him, the enraged man ripped its head off with his teeth — and then carried the snake’s corpse home and fell asleep next to it.
In the case of the Croatian man, he didn’t need to resort to violence. He had drunk so much that the alcohol concentration in his body killed the snake.
In fact, the man was so concerned for the snake that he took it to a veterinarian. He might be into boozing, but he sure has a big heart.
How the Tables Turn
The Indian snake attack took place in mid-September. According to local media, the incident took place in the village of Chiyyavaram, in the southwestern Andhra Pradesh state, on September 18.
Local residents told Indian media that the man, identified only as Venkatesh, had gone out drinking. He was coming home late at night, and he was drunk out of his gourd.
As he stumbled down the village path, he suddenly stepped somewhere where he shouldn’t have. A snake shot out of the bushes and bit the man on his leg.
This wasn’t just any snake, either. It was a black krait, one of India’s most venomous snakes.
Part of the reason why the black krait is so dangerous is that its venom acts slowly. There are no statistics of the exact mortality rate from krait bites, but it’s high.
Venkatesh didn’t care about that, though. In fact, in his drunken state, he flew into a frothing rage.
Thus incensed, he ripped the noodly reptile off his leg and decided to give it a taste of its own medicine. Venkatesh bit into the snake’s head and ripped it clean off.
He then, being drunken as he was, shambled home still carrying the snake’s lifeless body. He tucked himself into his bed and fell asleep — with the headless krait next to him.
We wish the story would end there, but unfortunately, the krait’s insidious venom kept working overnight. By the time Venkatesh woke up in the morning, he was in very poor condition, and it wasn’t a hangover.
According to news reports, he was taken to a hospital and was in critical condition a few days later. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find additional reports of whether he survived.
Too Much Booze
The second unusual snakebite incident happened in the Eastern European country of Croatia, according to news reports. In early October, 42-year-old Stef Radulych was returning home from a business meeting.
The wheels of business, however, had needed quite a bit of oiling. Consequently, Radulych was very intoxicated by the time he was able to head home.
Suddenly, he felt a sharp pain in his leg. Looking down, Radulych noticed a snake on the sidewalk next to him.
However, the snake’s behavior was very strange. It seemed weak and was experiencing some kind of seizures, causing it to repeatedly whack its head on a nearby tree.
Unlike most people who had just been bitten by a snake, Radulych got worried about the animal. So, he did what seemed like the right thing to do to his drunken mind.
He grabbed the snake, stuffed it in his briefcase, and hurried to a local veterinary clinic.
Unfortunately, he was too late. The snake was already dead by the time Radulych reached the vets.
An examination revealed that the snake had died from acute alcohol poisoning. Its blood alcohol level was well beyond a lethal limit for a snake.
As to Radulych himself? Well, he seemed mostly fine — a little queasy, but no worse for wear.
Medical experts suspect that the high amount of alcohol he’d drunk partially neutralized the snake’s venom. Meanwhile, the veterinarians’ only explanation for the snake’s fate is that it managed to get itself so drunk from biting Radulych that it dropped dead.
However, they did state publicly that getting s***faced isn’t a good treatment against snakebites.
“Alcohol is a slow-acting, extremely dangerous poison. It ruins the health — even the snake couldn’t withstand it,” the veterinarians exhorted.