Any hopes Patty Buntine harboured of finding her beloved Maltese terrier cross alive were dashed the moment she spotted a sated-looking python lounging in her garden with a coconut-shaped bulge halfway down its body.
Buntine, from Katherine in Australia's Northern Territory, had begun to fret when three-year-old Bindi failed to appear for breakfast. "She was always there so I got worried and went to look for her," she said.
When Buntine walked around the side of her house to look for her dog, she came across the sluggish serpent. "It couldn't move and had its head up in a striking position," she said. "It's belly was bulging – it looked like a great big coconut was inside it. I knew straight away that it had eaten Bindi."
Buntine said she was surprised that the three metre long (10ft) olive python had managed to outpace her fleet-footed pet. "She was a little smarty pants and would race away if she knew you were going to bath her or take her to the vet or something," she said.
"She was always darting all over the place. I don't know how she didn't realise this thing was creeping up on her."
David Reed, the local snake expert drafted in to catch the 10-year-old python, described the incident as "a one-of-a-kind" call-out.
"I've had a lot of calls about dogs that have been bitten by snakes, and I have even had an olive python that had eaten some newborn puppies, but never one like this," he said.
"The Maltese terrier was 5.8kg, and the combined weight of the olive python and the dog is a whopping 16kg. Therefore, theoretically, the weight of the snake is around 10kg, meaning that the olive has consumed 60% of its body weight in a single meal."
In other words, said Reed, "it's equivalent to a 100kg man eating a 60kg steak, or an average 16-year-old teenager male".
The snake's feat would probably not have impressed Buntine, who was trying not to think too much about what had happened. "I felt terrible," she said. "It's not very nice at all to think my little dog went that way."
