 |
| Photo courtesy Everglades National Park |
Meanwhile, please take most of the other facts that are going along with this story in the media with a grain of salt. There is no substantive hunting going on for pythons in the Everglades. What they have is a program put together by non-hunters which involves rules so onerous as to defeat the entire purpose.
Imagine that your house is full of termites. The Everglades National Park's approach to this problem would be to require that you capture each and every termite alive. Bring it in to allow a scientist to look at it to make sure that this is definitely a termite rather than an ant or a beetle. It must be measured and weighed, of course. Then the termite must be euthanized by an approved method.
This approach might make sense when you first suspect that there is a problem. You want to make sure that your problem really is termites. But such a tedious form of eradication would never, ever have a snowball's chance in hell of actually getting rid of the termite problem. What it will accomplish is keeping some termite inspectors employed until the house collapses.
That is about what is going on in the Everglades right now. Over 200,000 snakes which the bean-counters require be individually captured live and accounted for. This could never solve the problem, but the bean-counters are not about to ask that they be deprived of a job.
The problem in the Everglades will not be solved. Those responsible have effectively decided not to solve it. Rather, they are studying their own failure, which has directly resulted from them studying the growth of the problem rather than nipping it in the bud decades ago when the snakes first showed up. What the situation needs is new leadership, with science relegated to a diagnostic and supporting role rather than dictating our ecological values.
0 comments:
Post a Comment