CYD the snake took the phrase "light lunch" to a new level - by getting her chops around a 25-watt lightbulb.

Adventurous Cyd, a long North American bull snake, swapped her usual diet of dead mice for a candle bulb after she took a shining to it at her Hampshire home.

Amazingly, it stayed embedded in her gut from early April until this month when incredulous vets at a Wickham animal hospital X-rayed the ten-year-old slitherer.

Not only that but when the light was plugged back in to a socket it still worked.

Vet Caroline Coombs, of the Winchester Road animal veterinary hospital, said: "In 17 years practice I have never seen anything like it.

"You hear of dogs swallowing weird and wonderful things, but this was absolutely amazing."

Linda Pridham, 56, who looks after Cyd and three other snakes for her student son Phillip, said she thought the constrictor gulped the bulb as long ago as Easter.

"I noticed the bulb, which is used to heat and light her glass cage, was missing and thought nothing of it. I just replaced it with another one.

"Then my husband David and I went on holiday. When we came back I noticed the lump and got in touch with Caroline."

"I still can't figure out how she managed to do it. Either the bulb fell out of its socket or she twisted it out," said Mrs Pridham, of Catherington, near Horndean.

Cyd yesterday seemed none the worse for wear. She has a three-inch scar where the offending light was removed under anaesthetic.

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