A snake catcher risked his life to rescue a cobra that had fallen into a deep well. <br /><br />It took Gururaj Sanil, a professional snake rescuer, three hours and two failed attempts to bring the cobra up on March 7.<br /><br />The nearly six-foot-long male cobra had fallen into an open well at a village near Udupi in South India.<br /><br />Srinivas Acharya, who owned the well, thought the cobra would come up on its own and go away.<br /><br />But when that did not happen, Acharya contacted Sanil, who advised him to try to bring up the cobra with a basket. <br /><br />The cobra refused to leave its refuge deep inside, forcing Sanil to go to the village and lower himself into the 40 feet-well, with the help of four other men.<br /><br />The desperate and hungry Indian spectacled cobra, one of the world’s poisonous animals, kept hissing at him making the rescue effort extremely risky.<br /><br />At one particularly risky moment, the hissing cobra got too close to Sanil’s dangling legs, but luckily chose not to strike at him and swam away.<br /><br />“I failed in the first two attempts to rescue the cobra. I went down the third time and brought it up,” he said.<br /><br />After the rescue, Sanil placed the cobra in a snake bag and later released it in a nearby forest.
