Well hopefully this should reduce the population, but it ought to increase their economy for a while. Can you imagine how many people will show up for the hunt. Wow!
...Authorities say there are only 137 licenses statewide-a figure that grossly undercounts the number of snakes in homes. There's even a yearly amnesty day, when owners of illegal or unlicensed exotics can turn in their pets-no questions asked. In its fifth year, a few dozen pythons, measuring three to 10 feet, have been handed over.
Capt. Jeff Fobb, head of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's Venom Response Bureau, is one of the early adapters. He's been tracking the pythons since last summer, and "dispatching" them, as he calls it. (Fobb and company have rounded up only about 45 since then. "They were mostly doing it on weekends, says Gabriella Ferraro of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "They weren't quitting their day jobs." )
Fobb says he loves the Everglades-loves snakes, too-and that man is doing far more damage to the area than the reptiles. He doesn't relish slaughtering them. But he sees the problem, says "it's the right thing to do." Lately, the pythons are slithering out of border wildlife areas, and into farmland. Each fall, hundreds of snake parts are found in the tractor tracks of newly plowed fields. Fobb says a friend of his counted over 20 dead pythons in one freshly tended 40-acre field.
This weekend, Fobb will be out hunting python again. The cold weather helps flush them out of hiding; they'll be sunning themselves on the canal banks, and on the roads. He'll sneak up on them, grab them with quick hands, or his hook, and bag them. Back at his truck, he'll weigh and measure them, then decapitate them with a knife...
python hunt [
rr.com]
