Python killers are animal killers. Snakes are animals too. The most humane method should be used when it is necessary to end the life of any animal. All reptiles become dormant from even slightly cold temperatures. It makes sense that if you are able to chill them, they can be killed in a more humane manner. The newspaper article shows a less than humane method. Still works, but it left a lot of people feeling sympathetic to the python, perhaps for the first time. That made me happy. When I worked for Animal Control, the press had a field day when our director suggested breaking the eggs of nesting Muscovy ducks as a way to cull the population. Abortion rights people jumped in and said that was wrong. Everybody had an agenda. Like the old saying, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Oops, maybe a bad expression.

My agenda has always been to beg everyone to understand why the python is thriving in the first place. There is fossil evidence that giant constrictors once roamed the everglades. I think natives are dying off because the habitat that once favored them does not exist anymore, or is in transition, as it always is. The conditions today are obviously more favorable for the return of a large bodied constrictor. I say it is normal evolution and we should accept the pythons and leave them alone. We are not going to return the habitat to where it was when the most recent native reptiles flourished. Therefore, you have to accept the pythons (or whatever fills the void created by the disappearance of the other snakes) or accept nothing being there at all. I much prefer the pythons to nothing at all. The groups against the pythons are also the groups whose ultimate goal has always been that there is nothing there at all. I’m against that. The everglades region can thrive, just accept that it won’t be the same as the field guide from fifty or a hundred years ago, today, or fifty years from now. There will probably be emus, capybara, pouched rats, and macaws. So what? Better than a lifeless zone. You want to pave it though, don’t you? Admit it.

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