Snake catcher enters well in heart-stopping cobra rescue

A snake catcher risked his life to rescue a cobra that had fallen into a deep well.

It took Gururaj Sanil, a professional snake rescuer, three hours and two failed attempts to bring the cobra up on March 7.

The nearly six-foot-long male cobra had fallen into an open well at a village near Udupi in South India.

Srinivas Acharya, who owned the well, thought the cobra would come up on its own and go away.

But when that did not happen, Acharya contacted Sanil, who advised him to try to bring up the cobra with a basket.

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.

The desperate and hungry Indian spectacled cobra, one of the world's poisonous animals, kept hissing at him making the rescue effort extremely risky.

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.

"I failed in the first two attempts to rescue the cobra. I went down the third time and brought it up," he said.

After the rescue, Sanil placed the cobra in a snake bag and later released it in a nearby forest.