Qantas attempts to recreate bad Samuel Jackson movie

I’ve now read this story a few times and I’m still rather dumbfounded by it, partly because it happened at all and partly because of just how detailed and potentially over the top the response was.  A shipment of twelve baby pythons in Australia arrived at its destination with only eight snakes in the box and no indication of where the other four went.  Were they eaten by the other snakes?  Apparently not.

“Our people called in a reptile expert and there was a suggestion that some of the baby pythons had eaten the other pythons because apparently it is not uncommon for baby pythons to eat each other," [Qantas corporate manager David Epstein] said. Qantas staff then weighed the remaining baby pythons to determine if they were heavier, but they were not.

Then there was concern that the animals might be endangered, meaning that they could not fumigate the plane because that would mean potentially killing endangered animals.  As it turns out, the animals were not an endangered species so the plane was fumigated.  Of course, that took time and meant flight delays. 

Oh, and they never found the four corpses, so it is not particularly clear what happened to those four snakes.

Escaped snakes ground Qantas plane – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)