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© Flickr/ Christopher Borges
A 17-month-old Brazilian toddler killed a venomous snake that slithered near him, according to the Gaucha radio station.

The young boy, named Lorenzo, might just be a real-life Hercules after biting a venomous viper to death.

The killer snake approached Lorenzo while he was playing the back garden of his parents' house in the town of Mostardas in Rio Grande do Sul State in the southern Brazil.

But the snake clearly messed with the wrong guy. The toddler grabbed the serpent and used the only weapon he had — his sharp baby teeth — to kill the reptile by biting it to the death.


"Snakes, like any other animals, have vital organs. The toddler could have killed the snake by biting its vital organs, such as the heart or the spine," Vladimir Krever, the head of the biodiversity program of Russia's WWF, told RIA Novosti.

When the little boy's mother came to get him she found Lorenzo with the snake in his mouth and covered in blood. The woman immediately took her son to the hospital for a checkup afraid that the boy had been bitten by the serpent.

Doctors at the hospital discovered that the boy was unharmed and that the blood he was covered in belonged to the snake.

The snake was later identified as a jararaca, or a pit viper, a species of venomous snake local to South America. The jararaca is a deadly snake whose bites can kill men if medical help isn't provided immediately.