‘Hero’ grandad takes brown snake bite for toddler granddaughter

A selfless grandfather has been praised as a hero after saving his granddaughter from an eastern brown snake bite, but is reconsidering his gardening methods after taking the bite himself instead.

Bundaberg man Chris Harrison was raking leaves in his yard with his toddler granddaughter Sophie and wife Maree when he spotted the snake under a mango tree. “She was right beside me, helping rake,” he said of the little girl.

Quickly shouting for Sophie to move out of the way, Harrison said his wife grabbed the little girl and at the same time he felt a sharp pain in his foot.

Harrison told the Bundaberg News Mail that he managed to make his way into his home before he started shaking and vomiting, and paramedics arrived on the scene to give him morphine before taking him to the hospital. He told news outlets that it was sheer instinct to ensure Sophie was safe before thinking of getting out of the way of the snake himself.

“I’m bigger than her and I can take the pain and she wouldn’t be able to,” he said. “I was just protecting my granddaughter like any Poppy would.”

The bite occurred earlier in May and Harrison has since recovered.

That said, the grandad said he wasn’t keen for a repeat performance, given that he was  bitten by a snake only in November – on that occasion, a yellow-faced whip snake – while gardening in thongs. He was wearing sneakers the second time around but said that still wasn’t enough to protect his feet, and that he could quickly tell the two bites were different, with the yellow snake bit actually feeling more painful.

Yellow-faced whip snakes are common from Townsville in Queensland to as far down as northern New South Wales and are often mistaken for easter brown snakes but are typically smaller and slimmer and with different facial markings. The yellow-faced whip snake is considered venomous but not dangerous, with bites causing extreme pain and swelling.

Brown snakes, however, are among the 12 Australian snakes that are considered not only venomous (there’s 100 of them!) but also deadly. A Townsville man died in April after being bitten by a brown snake, as did a woman in Meekatharra in Western Australia in February and a man in Tamworth, NSW, in January.

“The third time I may not be so lucky so I’m not doing the yard work ever again,” Harrison said.

Do you think you’d act as quickly as Chris Harrison when it came to protecting a loved one?