A 23-year-old woman was lucky to escape being bitten when she found a baby cobra in a bag of rice at her home in Odisha in eastern India.
On 29 June, Sagarika Sundaray went to get some rice for cooking in a home she shared with friends in Bhubaneswar. When she put her hand inside the rice bag she felt something inside that was cold and moving.
She immediately pulled out her hand and looked inside with a torch. She found a baby cobra, which was believed to be one week old and to have hatched in a nearby field before coming indoors in search of a safe refuge.
Sundaray called Snake Helpline, a non-government organization dedicated to rescuing snakes. They sent an expert to capture the baby cobra from the rice bag and release it in a forest.
Baby cobras can be as dangerous as adult snakes, as even at a very young age they have fully functional venom apparatus.
