Python in Shed: 13-Foot Snake Found in Man's Backyard Eating Cat Skull

A South Florida man cleaning out his shed on Sunday was stunned to find a 100-pound albino Burmese python nearly 13 feet long.

"It's a big snake," Lt. Lisa Wood, of the Miami-Dade Rescue Unit, told WSVN-TV. "An albino, so it's most likely somebody's escaped pet. Apparently there's a couple of rabbits and a cat missing from the neighborhood recently, so the snake may be to blame for that."

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The homeowner, Luis Eduardo Avendano, told CBSNews.com that the snake was eating a cat's skull when it was found. The man said one of his three cats recently went missing.

Avendano told police that the reptile popped out from under storage bins while he and a friend were cleaning the shed. Authorities said the shed must have been the snake's home for a while, as they found a shedded snake skin there.



It took five Miami-Dade Rescue members to carry the large snake out of the shed. It is unclear what the rescue unit did with the snake.

Pythons have become a problem in South Florida, as an estimated 150,000 snakes have been devouring prey at a pace that has disturbed the ecosystem's balance, according to The Huffington Post.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sponsored a "Python Challenge" in which they offered snake hunters prizes to capture as many of the reptiles as possible.

The monthlong contest in the Florida Everglades brought in 1,600 snake hunters from 38 states and Canada, but only 68 snakes were captured.

Nick Wiley, executive director of state's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said the contest was a small step in addressing the python problem.

"In our view, that number — the number that were harvested, taken out of the ecosystem — was an unprecedented number of samples that will help us answer questions about pythons and make us more effective at tackling this problem, removing them from the system," Wiley told the Huffington Post. "We're going to learn so much."

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