A professional python hunter in Florida needed assistance from family members to uncoil a giant Burmese python from his body and to ultimately subdue the second-heaviest python ever caught in Florida.
Carl Jackson, who is a contracted python hunter with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, was traveling back on Turner River Road in Big Cypress National Park in the afternoon on Jan. 13 when he noticed Burmese python tracks across the road over his truck tracks, as reported by Naples News.
They appeared to be tracks from a smaller snake, perhaps an 8-footer, tops.
“I go in [to the bushes] and walk around and I see a head,” Jackson told Naples News.
He immediately recognized that this was not a small snake.
Jackson began wrestling with the huge python, which dragged him an estimated 10 to 15 feet over a red and black ant hill.
“It was like riding a slow horse,” Jackson, 43, told Naples News.
“It was insane.”
Carl Jackson poses with the second-heaviest Burmese python ever caught in Florida.
Jackson’s python weighed 202 pounds, only 13 pounds from the record.
The python measured 16 feet, 10 inches.
Jackson relied upon his team to uncoil the snake from around his body several times. His team included his wife, Tasha, and adopted kids, Ryker Young, 20, and Jazzlyn Bateman, 16, all of whom just the day before became certified assistants in the FWC’s Python Action Team, Removing Invasive Constrictors program.
The python wound up being the second-heaviest python ever caught in Florida at 202 pounds. The record is 215 pounds caught in 2022.
Jackson’s python was a 16-foot, 10-inch female, which had been carrying 200 eggs.
Also on FTW Outdoors: Woman awakes to find python on her chest, ‘don’t move’
“That means more to me because that is 200 potential deer and native animal eaters [that were eliminated],” Jackson told Naples News.
Since moving from Utah to hunt pythons last year, Jackson has eliminated 91 pythons, including the longest one among the contracted hunters in 2025—a 17-foot, 10-inch python.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Python drags hunter 15 feet over ant hill; ‘like riding a slow horse’