A viral video of a snake regurgitating another snake it previously had eaten is horrifying, but as the would-be meal miraculously emerges alive from the mouth of its predator, the nature video also offers a sliver of hope to those who are afraid of being swallowed up whole and meeting a dark end.

The snake-ception was captured in Newton, Texas, a couple of hours northeast of Houston, near the Louisiana border. Christopher Reynolds said he shot the video after spotting the snake off the road while driving past on Sunday.

“Nope, nope, nope,” he can be heard saying as the eaten snake starts to come out. “Oh whoa, this is crazy, is that other snake alive? … That other snake’s alive!”

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The long snake slowly slides out, wriggling around.

“That is that other snake’s super-ultra lottery lucky day,” Reynolds says about the still-living victim. “Wow, I can’t believe that little dude’s still alive.”

He suggests on the video that walking up to the predator snake with his wife was what caused the regurgitation. And according to National Geographic, it’s true that a snake might give up its food and then slither away as a defense mechanism. That’s because having another snake in the belly — or any other animal — slows the escape. Snakes eat their prey whole, leaving the possibility victims may still be alive when regurgitated.

“Anyone who keeps snakes knows you should leave them alone after they eat, because you can make them regurgitate,” herpetologist Kenney Krysko told National Geographic.

After the living prey emerged from its digestive prison, a cavity without air and full of acid, Reynolds narrated as the freed snake tried to get its bearings.

It’s not the first to be vomited up. As National Geographic noted, another video made the rounds last year showing a python regurgitating an antelope in India, set off by the stress of people watching it eat the enormous mammal. The antelope’s hind legs appeared to be dangling out of the mouth of the snake before the torso started to come out, with one of the front legs tucked underneath it. Eventually the entire antelope is thrown up and the snake moves away from the crowd, including one man poking around the dead antelope and the python’s mouth with a stick.

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And although it seems like a serpentine form of cannibalism, it’s also not unusual for a snake to eat another snake. Nor is the lucky snake from Texas the first to emerge alive.

A photo from a couple of years ago appears to show a black snake in Australia eating its way out of a brown snake and making a hole large enough to escape from, in what sounds like the reptile version of a Hollywood action flick. One expert suggested the black snake was already consumed when the brown predator suffered a trauma, like being hit by a car, causing it to burst and die and giving its still-living meal a second chance at life.

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