People at a North Carolina Chili's got more than they ordered when a loose python was discovered.
Police responded to the restaurant after they got a call about a large snake in the area on Nov. 5, Shallotte Police told WECT. The Shallotte Police Department posted on Facebook that they believed it was someone's pet.
"That beautiful snake is my baby girl, Una," Christen Schiel told WECT. "She is the best snake anyone could ever have and I’ve been missing her deeply for the past two months. But she must have been hiding in my car and came out at the wrong time when I was at Chili’s around 2:30 p.m. yesterday."
The TV station cited a North Carolina law which says pythons are legal pets in the southeastern state.
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Una was identified by Schiel as a ball python. Their name comes from their "behavior of curling themselves up into a tight ball," according to Petco, which adds they are native to the grasslands of western and Central Africa.
Schiel was reunited with her pet she refers to as "baby girl" the day after police recovered it.
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"I didn’t sleep because I was missing her and I went into depression and was crying hysterically," Schiel told the local TV station. "What a lot of people don’t know or realize is that losing a reptile is the same as losing a dog or a cat for another person."
The python's owner said she had been suffering from dehydration, had lost some weight and had a few small injuries, but is on the road to recovery.
