Cat Alerts Owner To Venomous Snake In Shopping Bag

An Australian man, who encountered a venomous snake in his shopping bag, said he would have been "none the wiser" if his cat had not raised an alarm.

Australia is home to one of the deadliest and venomous species known to man, and Ricky Owens of South West Victoria was reminded of this fact recently.

Owens had left his shopping bags in his kitchen and gone outside for a couple of hours, according to ABC News. When he returned, Owens noticed his cat, Gordon, banging on one of the lounge chairs in the kitchen, hissing and scratching at something and then jumping back. Alerted by the cat’s unusual behavior, Owens moved the chair but did not find anything. Later, when the cat continued to scratch at the shopping bags, Owens picked them up to inspect the contents.

"Me and the cat and the snake, all jumped in the air — I threw the cat outside," he said to the outlet.

The reptile turned out to be a one-foot-long tiger snake. Tiger snakes are notoriously venomous but are not an aggressive species, according to the Biomedical Science Department at the University of Melbourne. Owens believes the snake slithered into the house through a gap in his fly screen door and hid inside one of the shopping bags.

After the snake got out of the bag, it tried to hide behind a refrigerator. "All I had was about six inches of the belly of [the snake] hanging out from under the fridge," Owens said to the outlet. "I didn't know which end was the bitey end and which was the tail."

He was able to pull the snake out from under the fridge and throw it outside the house.

"If your animal is doing something in the house that it doesn't regularly do, take notice of it," Owens said, urging people to take notice, ABC News reported. "If my cat hadn't played up … I'd be none the wiser."

According to Prof Geoffrey Isbister at the University of Newcastle, a tiger snake venom bite could make a human collapse within 15 minutes, depending on the bite’s severity. The snake’s venom is a powerful neurotoxin and can cause paralysis, The Guardian reported.

"Just imagine you're a little kid who wants to reach into those bags and go, 'What's this thing?'" Owens said to ABC News. "Anything can happen."