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An eight-year-old Indian boy killed a cobra that had wrapped itself around his arm and sank its fangs into his skin by biting it back in a miraculous tale of survival.
The boy, known only as Deepak, was attacked by the snake in the remote Pandarpadh village in India’s central Chhattisgarh region on Monday, it was reported.
The cobra latched on to him while he was playing outside his family home and wound its body around his arm, before rearing back and biting down to inject its deadly poison.
Fighting through the pain, Deepak furiously shook his arm but couldn’t release the reptile, at which point he decided to give the attacker a taste of its own medicine and viciously sank his own teeth into its body, successfully killing the animal.
“The snake got wrapped around my hand and bit me. I was in great pain,” Deepak told The New Indian Express.
“As the reptile didn’t budge when I tried to shake it off, I bit it hard twice. It all happened in a flash,” he said.
Snakebites are exceedingly common in India – a study published last week revealed that more than 85 percent of snakebite deaths recorded in 2019 occurred there.
Fearing for Deepak’s life in the aftermath of the bite, the boy’s parents rushed him to a nearby medical centre where he was kept under observation to ensure he would recover successfully.
An examination of his injury led doctors to discover that he sustained a ‘dry bite’, meaning the cobra did not release any venom.
“Deepak didn’t show any symptoms and recovered fast owing to the dry bite when the poisonous snake strikes but no venom is released,” a snake expert told The New Indian Express.
Dry bites are often administered by adult snakes who have full control over the deployment of venom from their glands.
Snakes use venom to kill their prey, or when fighting off dangerous predators. Dry bites are often delivered when the snake is trying to warn or scare off animals, rather than kill them.
The Jashpur district where Deepak had his tussle with the cobra is renowned for serpentine activity – there are more than 200 species of snake living in the region.
A recent study found that of the 63,000 people estimated to have died from snakebites in 2019, 51,000 were killed in India.
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