Jaine (19) had suspected something was wrong when she couldn’t see or hear her son who’d been playing in the garden in their home in the town of Mostardas in Brazil.

With the boy was a dead snake – which, it seems, Lorenzo had bitten and killed. In a panic, Jaine called her husband, Lucier de Souza (22), and they immediately set off for the nearest hospital, about 175 km away.

Fortunately they’d remembered to put the snake in a bottle and took it with.

At the hospital experts identified the snake as a  jararaca pit viper, an extremely poisonous species. Its bite leads to bleeding and kidney failure that would be fatal without medical care.

At first Lorenzo’s parents thought their dog had bitten the snake to death, but a doctor explained their son managed to grab the snake behind its head, preventing it from biting him.

“The boy was very shaken up,” the doctor said. “I think it was a self-defence instinct that kicked in, or he thought it was a toy.”

Sources: RT News; Independent Online