A Cambodian boy slept in the presence of a potential man-eating snake over a period of years until nature finally took over.

A Cambodian boy slept in the presence of a potential man-eating snake over a period of years until nature finally took over.
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Animals

This little boy slept with a python for years: Their incredible friendship ended up broken by the snake’s animal instinct

Joe Brennan
Born in Leeds, Joe finished his Spanish degree in 2018 before becoming an English teacher to football (soccer) players and managers, as well as collaborating with various football media outlets in English and Spanish. He joined AS in 2022 and covers both the men’s and women’s game across Europe and beyond.
Update:

Wild animals should be kept in the wild, even if you think they are your friend. It took a near-miss involving a family in Cambodia to realise they had been dicing with danger for years.

Sambath, a young Cambodian boy, ‘befriended’ a 120kg, 6-metre-long deer-killing machine after it was discovered by his father hiding underneath a bed in the family home.

Instead of reporting the snake’s presence to the local authorities, the couple decided to ‘adopt’ it. They named the snake Chomran. Reports suggest the mother was particularly keen on keeping the animal as a spiritual protector of the household.

Their baby boy, Sambath, was only a month old at the time—a potential lite bite—but a mix of fascination, spirituality, and arguably naivety took over, and the snake remained in the house.

The snake was not kept outside—it was treated as part of the family and was even allowed to sleep next to the child at night. At this point, I’d just like to mention that a Burmese python’s diet includes everything from rabbits to pigs, goats, and even alligators. A one-month-old child would be considered tapas.

And so, the story continued—until Mother Nature had her say. One day, the python bit the young boy. It’s unclear what exactly provoked the bite, but it certainly wasn’t intended to kill—that’s not how pythons operate.

Had the python meant to kill, it would have clung onto the child and begun to wrap its tree-trunk-sized muscles around his abdomen and chest, pulling tighter with every breath the nervous prey released. Once all the air was squeezed out, the python would start detaching its jawbones to stretch around the corpse, head first. It ‘walks’ its jaws down the body and swallows the prey whole—only then does digestion begin.

This time, the boy suffered only minor injuries to his leg, and the animal was taken to the local zoo—where it should have gone in the first place.

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