Don't you just hate unannounced visitors? While most people have to deal with annoying door-to-door salesman (here's looking at you AT&T guys and your high-speed internet packages), this woman had the most shocking guest ever. She opened the door only to find a highly poisonous cobra on her porch.
The 66-year-old woman heard a knock at her door. The incident happened a village near Hangzhou, eastern China, so cobras are a potential threat there. Still, the woman was expecting a visitor, not a deadly cobra at her door step. She said she had been watching TV when she heard a knock. To push this situation from bad to nightmarish, when she opened the door, the snake slid into her home before she could shut the door.
"I think the snake wanted to cool off inside because it was too hot outside. It started at the door and now it's inside," the woman said, according to Global Times. Chinese cobras are active during the day and enjoy a variety of climates. However, hot temperatures may have played a role.
Fortunately, the woman made the wise move. She immediately fled the house in terror and contact the authorities to help her, according to the Chinese news media Global Times. If you thought water snakes and rattlers were bad, China actually has several kinds of cobras including the Chinese cobra, the monocled cobra, and the Indochinese spitting cobra. All three make for a bad time.
Cobras In China Are An Issue
It was a Chinese cobra, which is highly venomous and also grows to five feet. Both are bad. How bad? Well, between 1904 and 1938, the snakes bit 593 people in Taiwan. It led to a chilling 87 percent fatality rate. Who knows how many people have died since then. The snake venom is a deadly cocktail of neurotoxins, cytotoxins, and cardiotoxins. In addition to a lot of pain, it causes necrosis and paralysis as well as death.
Fortunately, there's now an antivenom. However, it really depends on the medical facilities and how much venom. In particular, children and older people are more vulnerable to die from a cobra bite. Fortunately, fire fighters came to the scene, captured the snake, and released it back into the wild.
