Buddy Grant age 11, of Dallas. Texas, for his question:

Is there a large snake that crushes its prey?

The far distant ancestors of our present day snakes were long, lizard like reptiles why crept about the earth on four short legs. Their food was live animals, smaller than themselves, which they grabbed and swallowed whole. Many millions of years ago, these ancient reptiles were faced with a serious problem. Generation after generation their short, stumpy legs were getting shorter and stumpier.

The process took a long, long time and the creatures had time enough to learn to manage without feet or legs, Many a creature may have failed to come through such a handicap   but the ancestors of the snakes seem to have faced up to their problems and solved them, When the process was finished, the whole new family of snakes crawled about the earth. They had learned to get about and fend for themselves with long, scaly, legless bodies and fine sets of gripping teeth.

They had developed a most complicated muscular movement for slithering along the ground. They never gave up their old habit of swallowing their prey whole and alive, but they had learned to develop different methods of catching and holding it. It was not easy for a legless snake to hold a struggling frog while it was about to be swallowed.

This problem was even bigger for the bigger snakes,, who naturally liked to swallow bigger, and stronger, meals. Some of them, most of all the boas and pythons, discovered the trick of winding their supple coils around the struggling prey. Our whip snake and the racer will wrap their coils around a dinner until it is quiet enough to be swallowed. Certain rat eating snakes crush the wind out of a rodent by pressing it against the walls of its oven burrow,

The boas and huge pythons have a reputation for mashing their victims to a pulp before swallowing them. Actually, these big fellows cannot use their muscles with such violence and they would not do so if they could: A large python has been known to swallow a pig without so much as breaking a bone. One python destroyed in the palace grounds in Siam, was found to have swallowed a royal Siamese cat without even disturbing the bell around her neck..

The waiting python or constricting snake winds its coils around its kicking victim in a matter of seconds. As the victim breathes out, the snake simply tightens its coils. The victim is able to take in smaller and smaller breaths and soon suffers from nervous collapse and suffocation    Then the python relaxes its grip and swallows its dinner head first,

As you see, this is different from the popular idea of a powerful python crushing large animals to pulp. Andy doubts if the snake would enjoy such a mashed up dinners in any case.