An eight-year-old Indian boy killed a cobra that had wrapped itself around his arm and sank its fangs into his skin by biting it back in a miraculous tale of survival.
The boy, known only as Deepak, was attacked by the snake in the remote Pandarpadh village in India’s central Chhattisgarh region on Monday, it was reported.
The cobra latched on to him while he was playing outside his family home and wound its body around his arm, before rearing back and biting down to inject its deadly poison.
Fighting through the pain, Deepak furiously shook his arm but couldn’t release the reptile, at which point he decided to give the attacker a taste of its own medicine and viciously sank his own teeth into its body, successfully killing the animal.
‘The snake got wrapped around my hand and bit me. I was in great pain,’ Deepak told The New Indian Express.
‘As the reptile didn’t budge when I tried to shake it off, I bit it hard twice. It all happened in a flash,’ he said.
Snakebites are exceedingly common in India – a study published last week revealed that more than 85 per cent of snakebite deaths recorded in 2019 occurred there.
