Reptile group sues to overturn python ban

[patientz3ro]

You know your dealing with propaganda when you hear the same memes repeated over and over again without any logical analysis. How many times was it repeated in the comments where someone said "they get a small animal, it grows big, and they release it in the wild".

Friggin animal planet and the news are responsible for the majority of these memes too.

That's one of the issues raised in challenging the legality of the ban. Part of the justification for the ban was that the Burm problem in Florida began with people releasing pets into the wild. Since the population has gotten so large, that would appear to indicate that these snakes are perfectly suited to take over this ecosystem. If it actually WAS a matter of pet snakes being released, that would make sense. For a very small number of animals to explode into the population that exists now... Just wow.

Not once did the study presented to the legislators mentioned that there is almost 0% genetic diversity in the current population. Nearly every Burm that has been caught has had an almost identical genetic make up. That's not possible if the initial population was made up of random animals released in random spots. Incidentally, the genetics of the captured snakes exactly match the genetics of snakes known to have come from a breeding facility destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Somewhere around 900 Burms were lost, and never recovered. Of course, with an initial introduction of almost 1000 animals, there's very little question that they're going to become established and thrive. But that's not nearly as frightening as an enormous population arising from just a few randomly dropped snakes.

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