Python Owner Stays Cool Under Pressure

Kaa was always such a friendly snake. Even the next door neighbors let their baby pet it.

But when Irvine resident Lisa Stockholm reached into her pet python’s cage Thursday morning, Kaa apparently mistook her hand for a rat--its usual bimonthly meal--and sank its teeth into her clenched fist.

The 9-foot, nonpoisonous Burmese python had never bitten her before, so Stockholm thought Kaa soon would realize its error and let go.

Five minutes went by. Kaa’s teeth still were sunk into Stockholm’s hand and the 10-year-old constrictor had wrapped its body up the length of her arm.

“I just tried to hold still. But every time I moved, he tensed up--and it was very painful when he tensed up,” the 20-year-old Stockholm said.

Stockholm flagged down a maintenance man for help. He took one look and decided to call the Orange County Fire Department.

Firefighters were admittedly perplexed when they found the woman with her arm stuck inside the 6-foot high Plexiglass cage built by Stockholm’s husband, Steve Ballinger, a fourth-year medical student at UC Irvine.

Kaa, named after the python in “The Jungle Book,” eventually let go when firefighters gave Stockholm a breathing apparatus and released a smoke bomb in the outdoor cage, leaving the snake uninjured and Stockholm with minor cuts on her hand by 11:50 a.m.

“When our crews left, the snake was sitting there sticking its tongue out at every one,” Fire Capt. Hank Raymond said.

“(Snakes) are really mindless,” Stockholm said Thursday afternoon. “He was just in his feeding mode and was going to hold on until his food was dead.”

Stockholm said her 25-minute ordeal began as she was trying to move Kaa, a gift from her husband last Valentine’s Day, from the main part of the cage to an adjoining feeding area.

“I always put my hand in and present a closed fist so he’s not startled and won’t bite me,” she said. “He didn’t investigate my hand at all and just bit me. . . . I assumed he would strike and let go.

“I used to work in a pet store, and I’ve been bitten by snakes before, just a couple of times. They usually just strike and let go,” she explained.

But when the 35-pound Kaa didn’t, Stockholm said, she began to worry.

“I didn’t know what to do. Even if I found someone to help me, I didn’t know if they’d want to stick their hand in the cage to help,” she said, laughing.

When firefighters arrived at the couple’s campus home on Verano Place about 11:30 a.m., they discussed a few ways they might try to release the snake and settled on using the bomb, which spews red smoke.

Stockholm, however, said that by then she was willing to let them exterminate her pet if necessary.

But firefighters sealed the top of the cage with plastic, placed the smoke bomb on a pole and stuck it inside the cage.

“As soon as the smoke got to the snake, it let go,” Capt. Raymond said. “As soon as it let go, they took the bomb out of the house.”

With the python safely inside the elaborate cage, which consists of a 4-foot-by-3-foot horizontal section and another 6-foot-by-2-foot pentagonal section, Stockholm reflected on the unusual behavior of her pet, which ultimately got four live rats for his trouble Thursday.

“He’s never displayed any kind of aggression or hostility at all. He is very placid,” she said of the Burmese python, a variety of constrictor that can grow to 20 feet long.

She added that she wanted to “settle down” after the attack before deciding whether to keep Kaa.

“(It has) a lovely home, that ingrate,” she said.