I know Kenney pretty well. I wouldn't have said what he did and I think he should have been a little more careful with his words given the backlash from the Rodda et al. media circus. However, Kenney is a pretty light-hearted guy and I can picture him saying that to anyone whether he has an agenda or not. He has a very animated personality. Like you said, it wasn't a lie, even if it was over-the-top. No reason for him to backpedal about the statement. I didn't say everyone is sympathetic in regard to the pet trade. My point is that SOME of us are and that we need to start agreeing on some simple facts about pythons. There has to be a middle ground if we're ever going to make progress in this debate. Otherwise, neither side will ever take the other seriously and we're going to be looking at eternal warfare. I don't think anybody here wants that.



I honestly don't know much about the situation with Gordon and the media. I know that the USGS has "media people" (for lack of a better term) that made the press release. I think Gordon still stands behind those maps (although Bob has told me that there are some points he would like to revisit (in light of new evidence)). Part of the problem is that a lot of people took them to mean that pythons WILL colonize the entire area shown in the map when the real purpose of the map was to show where pythons MIGHT establish themselves because the climate is similar. This doesn't mean they WILL colonize all of those areas. It ONLY means that the climate matches. I realize there were some issues with using P. m. molurus and some northern records that may not have been substantiated. But, I still don't think most people realize what the map was trying to say and I think that is where the media made the problem worse. I'd have to go back and look at Gordon's statements to form an opinion on how much he was pushing an agenda. From the conversations I've had with him he was all about the science. Again, this isn't really my department.



I think the difference in who is being misquoted or "abused" by the media has to do with the fact that the scientists are the first people they go to when they report the story. This is the stage when the reporters want to make the problem sound as threatening as possible. They do the same thing with hurricanes, shark attacks, etc. Then, they hear the other side of the story so they want to cover that. In the case of the population estimates they used some ridiculously low numbers (1,000 pythons). That number is clearly wrong. The number of 140,000 or 180,000 is probably wrong too. It's probably somewhere in the middle. But I guarantee it is more than 10,000 and it falls somewhere in the range given by scientists in the first place. I think we need to settle on the middle-of-the-road number but we're never going to get an exact figure so we could argue about this forever. The point is that there are thousands of pythons out there and it is a problem. We should be able to agree on that. Right?



Mike

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