An elderly Nan'ao woman owes her life to eight cats which fought off a giant cobra trying to climb into her bed, the Yangcheng Evening News reported.

With the help of his eight cats, woodsman Lin beat the poisonous snake to death, saving his mother.

The 170 centimetre-long snake slithered into Lin's home, a single-storey house in the woods, one morning, trying to climb into his mother's bed.

But as it made its way across the floor Lin's cats surrounded the deadly snake, bravely attacking it. After the mother cat trampled the cobra's head, her seven children rushed in to bite its body, dragging it out of the house. With the cats pinning it to the ground, Lin finally managed to beat the snake to death.

Lin said his mother would have been killed by the poisonous snake, if it wasn't for the fearless cats.