Man bites snake 'for the experience’

When Orange resident Rodney Williams saw a brown snake in the front yard of his neighbour’s house, he didn’t want the potentially lethal animal to pose a threat.

So he did the unthinkable – picked the snake up off the ground and bit its head off, before biting into its stomach and tail.

Williams, who admitted he’d been drinking before the dangerous encounter, told Fairfax Media’s Central Western Daily that he’d seen Indigenous people kill snakes by biting them and had always wanted to try it for himself.

“I bit its head off first so it couldn’t bite me,” he said.

“That’s how you kill a snake, you don’t use a shovel.”

Williams, who was born and bred in Orange, said he’d never seen a brown snake in the area before but had seen a few red-bellied blacks. He described the incident as a “learning experience.”

“I’ll probably do it better next time,” he said.

However local snake handler Greg Pringle said it doubted it was a King Brown. "In all my years I have never seen one in Orange. There is an abundance of Copperheads here, which I think this snake probably was. But the best thing to do is to not go near them, just leave them alone."