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Health & Fitness

Sneaky Snake: The Great Python Hunt in the Everglades

Make python an expensive delicacy, spend billions to make it illegal to possess the meat, and – Viola! – the snakes are hunted to extinction.

Once, I awoke in my easy chair with a nasty hangover. The first thing I noticed was the tail of a snake slipping behind my old couch. My nap had not been meant to rest and restore, but to prepare myself for round two.

I’ve heard it said that people kill things they are afraid of or don’t understand. Damn skippy they do. I can’t imagine why anyone in their right mind, would intentionally go to sleep in a house where there was, or ever had been, a snake.

I sat briefly trying to determine how best to deal with the situation I found myself in. They say beer makes men braver, but not when it comes to snakes. I guess I’m from the old school; I believe the only good snake is a dead snake. I got on the phone, wait, I went out into the yard and got on the phone and invited a few friends over for a case of beer and a bon fire.

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As we sat there drinking and joking, me in my recliner and them on the couch, I was as nervous as a Nun on Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

“What’s wrong with you boy?” One asked.

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“Nothin, I just feel like doin something crazy. Let’s burn that ole couch.”

They were in immediately and started dragging and manhandling it through the door. I didn’t help, but watched it carefully, half expecting to see the snake drop out onto the floor as they wrestled with it. Once in the yard, we set in on fire and watched it burn, whooping and dancing like Indians. I spent that night with someone else and moved the next day, searching my thing to make sure no snake made the move with me.

This month, Florida began a snake contest in the Everglades. That’s right, there are an estimated 300,000 Burmese Pythons roaming freely in the Everglades, eating everything in their paths. I will spend the rest of my life not hunting snakes and making sure no snake hunts me. There is a prize for the longest snake killed – they grow up to twenty feet – and for the most killed. So far, one thousand contestants have killed only 21 snakes.

I wrote about this last year and suggested all we need to do is offer rewards for every snake killed, and this would bring out every redneck who owns a gun, problem solved. It appears someone took my suggestion to heart. However, making it work is not so easy, the government needs to get a little more creative.

Everyone knows that the only surefire way to inspire a red-blooded American to do a thing, is to absolutely, positively forbid him to do it. Make it illegal and rednecks will be duty bound to do it. Did they not learn anything from moonshine, marijuana or their dealings with leaders of third world countries? They must forbid it, but secretly support it at the same time. Apparently spending sixty billion a year to stop it and incarcerating thousands, doesn’t hurt either.

Develop a system similar to the now defunct scrap industry and watch the snakes disappear.

Turn Python meat into a delicacy that can only be afforded by the rich and make sure you spend billions to make it illegal to possess the meat and viola, Pythons are hunted to extinction.

Let someone kill the child of a high ranking politician with a Python in his possession, and see how long Pythons survive.

Just figure out any way to make killing a Python profitable in our capitalist system and Pythons will go the way of gasoline, baby seals, whales, elephants, the family unit, innocence, and virgins.

Or the best way to ensure the total annihilation of the Python, turn Hollywood loose on them. Come up with a reality show and pit average Americans, in head to head competition, to kill Pythons, against the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rosie O’Donnell, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and whoever is spearheading the current attempt to relieve Americans of their freedom and guns. Disclaimer: those listed above are not killers, but play killers on T.V.

If all else fails, change the Honey Boo Boo show’s location to the Everglades and the snakes will either move on or develop creative ways to commit suicide.

Florida says there are only two ways to kill a Python, by decapitation or a bullet to the brain. I watched my grandma chop off the heads of several snakes, when I was young. She used a garden hoe for that purpose. Not me, I’d much rather have a little something that barks over here and bites way over there, in other words a gun.

I guess with the way things are going, soon the only people who will own guns will be cops, criminals, drug lords and Python hunters.

Kennesaw Taylor

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