Cat-Eating Albino Python Terrorizes Trailer Park

A gargantuan 13-foot albino python has been wreaking havoc across an Oklahoma City trailer park, devouring several felines during its time on the run.

Trevor Bounds of Red Beard Wildlife Control, who was hired to catch the snake from the Burntwood Mobile Home Park, estimated that the snake is a yellow-colored reticulated python around 13 feet long.

Bounds was hired by the park last week, but stated that the snake has been roaming the area for up to five months, and was responsible for the spate of missing cats.

"We're talking, that thing has been eating opossums, foot-long rats, and cats," Trevor Bounds of Red Beard Wildlife Control, who was hired to catch the snake from the Burntwood Mobile Home Park, told local news station KFOR last week. "The mouth on that thing is the size of your foot and when it opens up you're going to be able to fit something pretty large in there."

Residents of the park told KFOR that management urged them not to speak to the media about the snake, and even threatened some with eviction if they did.

Reticulated pythons are the longest snakes in the world, and are native to South and Southeast Asia. These huge snakes are non-venomous, instead killing their prey by suffocation, winding their long muscular bodies around their victims.

"The constricting is what can be the dangerous part," said Bounds. "You can't have small children or pets going near this thing, that's why this should've been tackled a whole lot sooner. Things could have gotten much worse."

"They can get up to 24 feet if you let them, maybe longer. The body on this snake is like Mike Tyson's bicep but 13 feet long," he said.

The snake is likely an escaped pet, Graham Alexander, a professor of herpetology, at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, told Newsweek.

"Given that the snake is an albino, it is likely that it was a pet snake," he said. "Thus I would guess that it would not be inclined to see human children as potential prey, but you cannot be sure. I would guess that a 13-foot Burmese python would be able to ingest only a pretty small child (probably max 3 years old). However, I can not be categorical about this (people tend to exaggerate when it comes to snake size although based on the photo, it seems it is about that size)."

Alexander agrees that a snake of this size is likely responsible for the missing cats, as it would be capable and willing to eat pets.

"I would assume that a snake like this would consider domestic cats as prey and so it would not surprise me if it consumed cats and small dogs," Alexander said.

Bounds initially found signs that the snake had made a den below one of the houses at the park, discovering animal carcasses in the coral space. However, since his first visit, his hunt has been delayed, and the snake is nowhere to be found. He set up cameras to spot the tricky reptile, but has not caught sight of it yet.

Alexander suggested that using a sniffer dog might be a good way of finding the elusive reptile.

"Pythons are ambush predators—typically, the snake will remain in one spot waiting for a meal to come passed. This means that if it is in a suitably concealed spot, it would be very difficult to find. However they will move around and when active it would be far more detectable (especially since it is an albino)," Alexander said. "Pythons are detectable by trained sniffer dogs, and using a dog would probably be the most efficient method of locating the snake."

Newsweek has contacted the park's management company Yes! Communities for comment.

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