How can you survive an attack by a boa constrictor? originally appeared on Quora: the cognition sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Respond past Ryan Mattes, on Quora:

Assuming yous're a 150lb adult, you shouldn't accept to do anything. Showtime, they don't just attack people. Y'all're too big to be prey, then in order to exist "attacked" you lot would have to be attacking the snake in the first place (unless it was a "Stupid Feeding Mistake", which I'll talk about below).

So if you're tromping through the jungles of South America (where almost all boa constrictor are from) you are unlikely to see one in the first place, and if you do, information technology volition be running away from you. If you lot were to meet ane and provoke it into attacking you lot, it would not endeavour to constrict you lot. It would coil and strike repeatedly, trying to go you to leave it lonely.

Constrictors but coil food, y'all run into. They don't endeavour to kill other predators (like you lot), they try to avoid them. If that fails, they try to drive them away by hit.

Now, if you're a constrictor'due south keeper, there are a number of dumb things you can do to get 1 coiling on your arm, all of which are known (among ophidian keepers) as SFE's, or "Stupid Feeding Errors." These include reaching into the enclosure with a rat in your mitt, or reaching into the enclosure after handling rats, or fifty-fifty reaching into the enclosure when there are rats in the same room. When they aroma rats, their feeding drive kicks in, and they'll strike and coil anything that is fifty-fifty shut to body temperature.

This is why you feed with tongs, or in a split enclosure, or any of a number of other rubber practices. Being constricted past your pet serpent is bad for you, information technology's bad for the snake, it'due south pretty much bad all the mode effectually. If it does happen, your options are pretty limited. Unwrapping from the tail beginning takes care of the constriction, merely commonly just results in your other arm being wrapped up. It also doesn't go the teeth out of your flesh. You lot can't really do that, though, as they have to willingly let go. You come across, their teeth are specially configured to make it nearly incommunicable to get abroad in one case they've got you.

Notice how the teeth point back into the mouth? That ways pulling away just sinks the teeth deeper into your flesh. So what you lot need is for the serpent to realize you lot aren't prey and decide to allow go.

Unfortunately, the just affair for this is patience. Your only other option is killing the snake and breaking its jaw, so you lot can remove the head of the snake from your arm in pieces. Since we're assuming this is a pet snake, that's not really a good selection.

So you wait. Unwrap information technology and try to go the ophidian to ball upward, or constrict something else. Only the principal idea I'thou trying to get across here is that you only take to sit down there and tolerate it until the snake realizes that it got its teeth into something that isn't prey.

With very large constrictors, like Burmese pythons and reticulated pythons that are ten+ years quondam, in that location is actually the possibility that they could kill you lot. In that case, you shouldn't be interacting with them alone, and then in that location should be someone else there to help you. Only you shouldn't exist keeping constrictors that large and nevertheless be making simple protocol errors.

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