Travel around the world and you will find people eat the strangest things – I’ve nibbled on scorpions and cockroaches in Thailand and I’ll stick with our mopane worms for now thank you very much.

Much like eating crab or crayfish requires careful attention so too, apparently, does eating a porcupine. I can’t say I have ever tried one myself but I would imagine the place to start would be a hefty session of quill removal.

Unfortunately, this rock python is rather ill-equipped for such a task and went for the old ‘unhinge the jaw and gorge’ approach, something visible at most petrol stations in the wee hours of Saturday morning. The Telegraph reports:

A mountain biker found the bloated body of the snake by a cycle track at the South African Lake Eland Game Reserve, near Port Shepstone, about 75 miles south of Durban…

‘‘It is apparent that several porcupine quills were lodged inside the digestive tract,” [the reserve’s general manager Jennifer Fuller] said.

I can almost hear my mother reminding me to chew my food. Whilst this may seem like an unusual meal for a snake it appears far more frequently than one might think, as confirmed by snake expert Johan Marais:

Pythons do eat porcupines and usually without problems other than the odd quill stuck somewhere,” he said.

“ But when disturbed after a large meal, the natural reaction for a snake is to regurgitate its meal so that it is mobile again and can escape. But regurgitating a porcupine is not that easy, and I am sure that is where things went wrong.”

Perhaps the trick is to have a couple of warm gin shots, I find you can regurgitate just about anything once three or four of those slip down.

[source:telegraph]