VIDEO: Workers Found This Extremely Bloated Python. When They Cut It Open, They Found THIS... Pythons can swallow almost anything. ALMOST. They can swallow small things like mice, bigger things like rats, slightly bigger rodents like squirrels and rabbits and even cats. In some terrible situations, pythons have been known to swallow human children. But recently, a python bit off more than it could chew, and it cost the snake his life. A 13 foot long python had the wrong animal for a meal the other day, when it tried to eat a 30 pound porcupine. Incredibly, the snake did manage to get the porcupine all the way down its throat and even into its digestive system. But in the end, it was the porcupine who came out victorious. The would-be crunchy snack embedded hundreds of its quills on the inside of the snakes skin, resulting in a hundreds of small wounds all over the snake. Jennifer Fuller, general manager at Lake Eland Game Reserve came out with a statement about the dead snake saying, The exact reasons for the snakes death are not clear. It is apparent that several porcupine quills were lodged inside the digestive tract. It had fallen off the rocky ledge. We dont know if it died beforehand or whether the fall drove some of the quills into its digestive tract. It appeared that the quills totally ruined the pythons digestive system, caused massive internal bleeding, and ultimately killed it. 