STAR PHOENIX (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) 09 August 04 Cooper's python swallows heating pad
Haddam, Conn. (AP): Alice the albino python had a little too much to eat for dinner.
Just hours before its owner, rocker Alice Cooper, was to take the stage at a theatre in Wallingford last weekend, the 2.4-metre-long snake ate a live rat and then swallowed a heating pad, wires and all, that had been left in its cage by mistake.
Before Saturday night's show, Cooper's roadies saw the snake's unusually large bulge and called at-risk snake helper Alison Sloan, who directed Alice to Higganum veterinarian Richard Jacobs.
"It was absolutely an emergency," Sloan told The Hartford Courant on Thursday, noting the wires could have ruptured Alice's intestines with fatal results.
After sedating the python, Jacobs made an incision along a row of scales and pulled the heating pad out.
"That's an outrageous X-ray," Jacobs said Thursday, looking at the pre-op picture that showed the wires and contacts from the heating pad -- plus a rodent. "It's probably the most astonishing X-ray I've taken in my career."
Sloan, director and owner of Ashleigh's Rain Forest in Essex, allowed Cooper to borrow a yellow anaconda for Saturday's show to replace the python, which undulates onstage with Cooper during his performances.