The “Florida Man” moniker is celebrating ten years of hilarious memes, and while there is already enough cultural confusion around the basic idea of what men and women are, the latest insane video to come out of Florida can at least earn high school student Onya Lee-Golighty an honorable mention for her impressive snake wrangling.
In a video posted to Instagram by the girl’s father, Onya is seen removing an 11-foot python – which is 11 feet more than most people wanted to deal with – from her neighbor’s backyard in a struggle lasting several minutes as the monstrous slithering beast contorted itself around Onya and her father.
Newsweek narrated the video, writing:
Arriving at the scene, Lee-Golightly determined that they were dealing with a python, and while long at 11 feet in length, it was within the average range of 10-16 feet for the species. Explaining the situation in a preamble before the video, Daniel Golightly, the girl’s father, said that she settled on a simple strategy: “I should probably just grab it from the head.”
In the clip, Lee-Golightly quickly grasps the python beneath its head, at which point it begins to coil around her arm. She and her father then begin lifting it up and moving it toward a bag to remove it from the yard. Daniel said in the video that the animal managed to coil around his arm at one point as well.
“It wrapped around my arm and let me tell you, the pressure was unlike anything I’ve felt,” the father can be heard saying at one point in the video. “I’ve never in my life seen a young 16-year-old girl do something like this in my life,” her father added.
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Speaking about the viral video after the fact, Onya described the ordeal as lasting about eight full minutes from their initial encounter to successful bagging. Both she and her father made it clear, as demonstrated in the video as well as recounting their actions later, that one of their main priorities was the well-being of the animal.
Pythons have long been considered an invasive species in Florida, as decades of failed pet ownership have released countless snakes into the wild, where they thrive on endemic prey. They are now considered an invasive species and the U.S. Geological Survey even considers their presence “one of the most intractable” wildlife management issues in the world. Some estimates put the number as high as 300,000
It’s also worth pointing out that Onya is not your average teenager doing this for kicks. The entrepreneurial student is the owner of a YouTube channel and Instagram account which documents her travails interacting with the animal kingdom. As her father said prefacing the clip, subscribers can expect much of the same.
And as far as the Florida Man mem goes, here is how Wikipedia described the popular internet fad.
Florida Man refers “to an alleged prevalence of men performing irrational, maniacal, illogical, delusional, insane, and absurd actions in the U.S. state of Florida,” the online encyclopedia says. “Internet users typically submit links to news stories and articles about unusual or strange crimes and other events occurring in Florida, with stories’ headlines often beginning with “Florida Man…” followed by the main event of the story.
“Because of the way news headlines are typically written, they can be creatively interpreted as implying that the subjects of the articles are all a single individual known as “Florida Man,” it adds.
Featured image: Screen shot from embedded Instagram video.
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