Two young pythons in a terrarium have been rescued from a pile of household rubbish in Amsterdam-Noord and are now being cared for at a reptile asylum.

The snakes, both around 50 centimetres long, were dumped at some time on Sunday night and were spotted by a passerby who warned the animal ambulance service.

‘We are used to quite a lot in our job but a python in a box by the rubbish is pretty extreme, even for us,’ the organisation’s director Erik Koldenhof told news agency ANP.

‘It was a typical case of people going on holiday and dumping their animals on the street,’ he said.