Posted by:
Upscale
at Thu Oct 13 22:54:40 2005 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Upscale ]
Saw Bill O’Reilly show last night showing some fools with their infant children lying on the floor in the gentle coils of their pet python, with generous images of the baby sucking on the python’s tail like a pacifier. Come on people, please don’t feed these images to the press! Can you see the handwriting on the wall? You are going to lose the right to maintain large constrictors with irresponsible “escapes”, deliberate releases and idiotic actions that the press is all to willing to attribute to anyone who would desire such a “pet”.
Here in south Florida we are getting enormous amounts of bad publicity from pythons that have been introduced into the “everglades”. It is bad for all keepers of reptiles.
South Florida has a huge number of non-natives that have been introduced, including many plants, toads, eels, fish, parrots, iguanas and snails. There are many deliberate introductions by wildlife officials too, including moths to eat the introduced melaluca plant, fish to eat the water hyacinth, and even western cougars to beef up the genetic pool of native panthers. The python has become the media darling. These large snakes make sensational news stories, and they always end with the irresponsible snake keeper to blame.
It would seem to me the live-bearing common boa would be the most logical of the large constrictors to flourish here rather than the egg-laying python, yet there have been close to two hundred Burmese pythons eradicated from Everglades national park in the last two years. These can’t all be “pets that got too big”; the eradication effort is not in the neighborhoods that are at the edge of town but inside Everglades national park, by park officials. Quite a little drive, past some fairly rural areas, for someone just to dump a python.
Who can explain the predominance of the Burmese as an established breeding colony rather than the boa? Are they more manageable and less likely to be deliberately released? Are the boas more arboreal and less noticeable?
Anyone else with meandering random thoughts?
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 Everglades burmese population... - Upscale, Thu Oct 13 22:54:40 2005
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