Snake needed surgery after swallowing metal barbecue tongs

A delicate operation has been performed on Winston the python to remove barbecue tongs the reptile had swallowed. The python's owner Aaron Rouse from Adelaide in Australia, was using the tongs to feed a rat to his pet when it latched onto them. "I tried to prise him off the tongs but we didn't have any hope of that at all," he said. Mr Rouse left the tongs with his python but was horrified when he later came back and found Winston had swallowed them entirely. "I was dumbfounded," he said. The distraught python owner rang a veterinary expert from Adelaide University, Dr Oliver Funnell, to work out what to do next.



"He said the snake had swallowed some tongs and initially I was imagining some small forceps or tweezers or something like that," Dr Funnell said. "When Aaron arrived, the snake was in a box and I said 'are you sure he swallowed the tongs?' and Aaron just laughed because when you opened the box it was obvious what the problem was. You could basically see the shape of the tongs, and there's a small clip that you slide forward to lock them and you could actually see the outline of that through the snake. You could even see the bumps on the end of the tongs."

The veterinary expert weighed up the options of how to save the python. "Snakes do have an ability to regurgitate food if they change their mind, but I was not sure if Winston was going to be able to regurgitate these [tongs] even if he tried," Dr Funnell said. "These are made out of a pressed metal, the edges are relatively sharp. [I decided] endoscopy was probably not a way to go because dragging the tongs out could have caused [internal] damage. The only sensible option was to do surgery." Dr Funnell wasted no time removing the tongs.



"With reptiles you have to make an incision between the scales and we just made it over the big end [of the tongs] because that was further away from some of the vital organs like the heart and the lungs," he explained. "The clip was at the other end so these tongs would have been trying to expand the whole time, which would have been quite uncomfortable. We were able to remove them quite easily once we got the big end out." Winston is now recovering and his owner will be much more cautious with feeding the python in future.