This excuse is very popular because it is one which the teacher must accept (at least once) even when she knows that the student is just bluffing! After all, anyone who has had a pet dog knows that dogs, especially pups, have the nasty habit of chewing up things, just for fun.
But when the 32 inch python from Brisbane, Australia, swallowed four golf balls, it didn’t do it out of mischief. It just thought the balls were large eggs!
It so happened that a couple had put the balls in their chicken coop to coax their hen to nest in a designated spot. Obviously the python had not heard of this common practice. When no one was around, he quietly slithered in from a nearby bush and helped himself to a hasty meal of four ‘eggs’.
A little while later, the couple returned to find the balls missing and a bumpy-bellied python stranded nearby. They immediately rushed the reptile to nearby Wildlife Sanctuary. There a veterinarian surgically removed the balls from the reptile's intestine, and saved its life.
This particular Australian snake isn't the first python to get a tough lesson in the dangers of swallowing oversize prey. A pet Burmese python in USA required life-saving surgery to remove a queen-size electric blanket from its digestive tract! Another python in the Florida ruptured its intestine when it tried to make a meal of a 6-foot-long American alligator!
Some years back, fire fighters in a Malaysian village were called in to remove the bloated snake sitting in the middle of a roadway. The reptile had swallowed an entire pregnant sheep and was too full to slither away and digest its super size meal!
The Tiger shark, much feared as a man-eater, also has the reputation of being called “swimming garbage can”.
Among the indigestible items that have been removed at one time or another from the stomachs of various Tiger Sharks are a roll of tar paper, a tom-tom, a chicken mesh, beer bottles, rubber tyre, fabrics, aluminium foil, coal, and unexploded ammunitions!
But when cows ingest plastic bags, it is no laughing matter. Some years back, a veterinary doctor in the gosala run by Sri Veera Venkata Satyanarayana Swamy temple on the Ratnagiri hill in Andhra Pradesh, removed about 10 kgs of plastic bags from the cows there.
Of the 86 cows in the gosala, several had fallen ill and two had succumbed to the illness. Post-mortems revealed that the cows had consumed polythene bags containing the remnants of prasadam strewn about thoughtlessly by the devotees.
A team of veterinarians were then rushed to the place to save the remaining cows.
So the next time you see someone throw plastic into the garbage dump, tell them the story from Ratnagiri. And for your part, pledge to Refuse, Reduce and Reuse plastic and segregate waste.
