13-Foot Trailer Park Python With Mouth ‘Size of Your Foot’ Survives off ‘Opossums, Rats and Cats’

A 13-foot-long python was discovered slithering around in an Oklahoma trailer park, and experts believe that it may be behind several reported disappearances of cats in the neighborhood.

Residents of the Burntwood Mobile Home Park reported seeing the snake last week, and staff sent out an alert to keep an eye out and that they were working to take care of it.

Trevor Bounds of Red Beard Wildlife Control told KFOR-TV that the snake was most likely a pet that had gotten loose or one that an owner had let out on purpose.

“We’re talking, that thing has been eating opossums, foot-long rats, and cats,” Bounds told the station. “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.”

While the wildlife control group was only hired last week to get rid of the snake, Bounds said that he believes the snake is an albino Reticulated Python — one of the world’s largest species of snake — and has been living under a home in the park for around five months.

“That home is pretty long and so getting two people in there, in a foot-and-a-half crawlspace to fight a 13-foot snake is just impossible,” Bounds told KFOR-TV. “When we looked underneath the floor at the home it created, that's when we started seeing a bunch of carcasses of large animals.”

Since the snake has been living in the park, Bounds said that at least half of the cats in the neighborhood have gone missing.

“The constricting is what can be the dangerous part,” Bounds told the outlet. “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.”

The mobile home park is right next door to Bryant Elementary School, with much of the land between them with no gate or fence. Given the snake’s tricky location, Bounds has set up a trap with a 24-hour live stream attached to it and will be alerted to it once the camera senses movement.

“They have an animal that large, and I can imagine that each one of those cats put up a nasty fight. So, when it’s been attacked that many times and to that extent, the nice non-aggressive pet snake we once knew is no more. This thing is dangerous now,” Bounds told the station.