Marshmallow, a 10-foot python, is intubated and ready for surgery.
It was a Canada Day weekend that Ontario Veterinary College (OVC) veterinarian Hugues Beaufrère and pet owner Troy Stuckless will not soon forget. The holiday weekend was interrupted by “Marshmallow,” a 10-foot-long albino Burmese python that needed emergency surgery after swallowing a bath towel.
Marshmallow isn’t from around Guelph. The snake had to be flown in from St. John’s, Nfld., and then driven from the Toronto airport to OVC. That meant surgery couldn’t start until after 9 p.m. on the Friday of the long weekend.
It was a nail-biting time for Stuckless, who had to wait more than 2,000 kilometres away and into early Saturday morning to hear whether his pal and “business partner” would be OK.
But it was business as usual for Beaufrère, OVC’s avian and exotic pet specialist. Marshmallow was the second snake he had operated on that week, he says, “although this case was different. It’s very unusual for a snake to swallow an entire towel like that.”
Stuckless owns Newfoundland Reptiles, a travelling exotic animal show. On June 27, he had given his beloved snake and star attraction a bath after the animal’s monthly meal. Five-year-old Marshmallow looked so comfortable snuggled up with the bath towel that Stuckless left the snake in its makeshift den. When he returned a few hours later, the towel was gone.
“This is where I felt more emotion in one second than I thought possible: worry, confusion, shock, anger toward myself and remorse, to name a few,” he says. “When you’ve had reptiles a long time like I have, you know there are a lot of things that can go right and a lot of things that can go wrong. This was so wrong that he could have died.”
For more, see the article in At Guelph.