A python in the toilet or a monitor lizard in the bathtub? This is nothing against the shark in the Vltava
Sheep, goats or a horse without a rider, or even a pig or a donkey, with whom the police have already caught, will certainly surprise the people of Prague when they meet them by chance, but they usually do not frighten them. It is sometimes different with reptiles. To those interested, Raniak showed, for example, the royal python, which caused quite a stir in November 2020: first in a hotel in Prague 3, where it scared a guest so much that the emergency services also arrived, even though he was not injured, and subsequently attracted media attention.
It all started with the scream of a newly accommodated visitor from abroad, who sat down on the toilet – and immediately looked down at the seats. Because there was a splash from below, without… – well, the person in question simply knew that there was no reason for the surface to become cloudy under him yet. What he saw was shocking: a fairly large snake coiled in the bowl. Royal lace, the catchers eventually determined.
Come on python! A strangler was waiting for the guest in the toilet bowl of a hotel in Prague 3
A snake that has escaped from its keeper and is found in a toilet bowl is not as unusual as a layman would assume. If it gets out of sight of the breeder, it does not need food, without which it can last for six months, but it goes for water. He often finds the toilet bowl as a “well”. From that, I can easily go further through the drain hole – and where it gets out is a matter of chance: it can go through the sewer pipe to the toilet on another floor of the same house, but also in another way. The experience of an elderly woman who was taking a shower in the bathroom and remembered reaching for the shower handle, which began to move, was also associated with water. He had wrapped himself around him…
However, a simple explanation could not be used in the case where the wife, after much insistence, convinced her husband to look at the hood above the stove: it does not work as expected and must be broken, because it occasionally hisses strangely. When the man took apart the device, he discovered a meter and a half long snake. “How he got there is not clear,” stated Raniak. With the fact that it was a royal snake originally from Vietnam, which is said not to be imported to us much.
However, people’s remarkable encounters with exotics do not only take place under the roof. Raniak recalled, for example, the case when a woman from Prague 8 called that she was walking along the crossing – and a chameleon was walking towards her. “He was going according to the rules, on the right side,” he noted.
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He also shared a story from the spirit period, in which a woman who went to the cemetery to fix the grave of her deceased husband played a key role. As she was leaving, she found a motionless steppe monitor lizard by the wall. In the cold weather, the animal was not active and did not fight back when she began handling it. The woman did not initially call the emergency services, but decided to do a good deed. She put the rather large creature in a “bag from the Vietnamese”, brought it home – and to make it feel better, she poured lukewarm water into the bathtub.
The rigid monitor really warmed up and started to climb out of the tubs, knocking down the bathroom shelves. Only then was the interception service called. On the contrary, he immediately called and called experts for a man who went to the forest near Zbraslav to pick blueberries – and when the blueberry tree opened, an iguana was looking at him. As unlikely as it sounded, he was really there. And he is said to be beautiful.
He poured the boiled female into the dipper
Sometimes the actions of people who get rid of their breeding in a strange way also cause a stir. In the spring of 2014, a random witness found two spiders in Jinonice – discarded spiders and terrariums among the trash in a container. As probably the most remarkable intervention, the head of the Steinbauer shelter remembers the report of the boatmen about the appearance of a dead and already smelly little shark in the Vltava Čertovka in the fall of 2009.
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The original estimate was that by throwing the oyster into the Vltava, some fish restaurant or perhaps a cruise ship got rid of objectionable, albeit expensive, raw materials originally intended for cooking. However, since rags and polystyrene were found in the shark’s body, it was rather the result of a failed attempt at taxidermy, when the stuffed fish stank.
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Veterinary technician Raniak confirms that the city’s police capture service sometimes receives hard-to-believe alerts. “I’ve learned to trust them,” he said, noting that many things can happen around the breeding of really exotic animals here – including encounters that seem quite bizarre in domestic conditions. So it is not always true that people could be wrong and that fear has big eyes. However, Raniak reassures: reptiles are usually not aggressive: they are not usually aggressive creatures, but rather shy. He himself has yet to be bitten by one. When he bled while treating animals, it was usually after a cat attack.