Python By lunatic67/stock.adobe.com
I’ve not read an article in Garden & Gun before, but this headline caught my eye: “She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters . . . but the Invasive Creatures Still Have a Hold on Her.”
Let’s begin with the backstory.
Burmese pythons are native to Southeast Asia, where they eat pretty much anything that moves. In five to seven years, a single python might consume seventy-two mice, fifteen rabbits, ten squirrels, six blue herons, four alligators, an opossum, and a raccoon, among other species.
They are part of the ecosystem where they come from, which is not a problem. But they are not part of the natural ecosystem in South Florida, which is a massive problem.
By the 1970s, they started arriving in Florida, especially in Miami, as the exotic pet trade boomed. However, some pet owners didn’t know what to do with a hungry constrictor that can grow to twenty feet and two hundred pounds, so they let them slither away. Others perhaps simply escaped. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew destroyed a breeding center for pet pythons near the Everglades, loosing hundreds more.
The result has been an invasion of staggering proportions.
No one knows how many Burmese pythons are in the Everglades today. However, experts do know that 90 percent of fur-bearing animals in the region have disappeared since the early 2000s, helpless against predators for which they have no defense.
Enter python hunters.
“You’ve got to be on your toes”
Donna Kalil grew up hunting, fishing, and running with her brothers through the wild. Their itinerant family eventually settled in Miami, where she stayed. She later worked in real estate, married, and had children.
In 2015, after hearing about the havoc the snakes were wreaking on the Everglades, she volunteered to put her outdoor skills to use. She became the first (and for some time, the only) woman in a program created to hunt pythons. Last fall, she took first prize in the professional category of the 2024 Florida Python Challenge by removing nineteen Burmese pythons in ten days.
She has been bitten more times than she can count by pythons’ curved, needle-sharp teeth. The constrictors have wrapped around nearly every part of her body, once including her neck. “It’s a dynamic situation out here,” she says. “You’ve got to be on your toes, and it’s best to bring a buddy.”
After the pythons are caught, they are euthanized painlessly. Donna and other hunters hate this part of their job, but they know they are saving innumerable animals and even species in so doing.
So far, this has been the most effective means of attempting to control the predators. The data suggests that native wildlife is responding in areas the hunters patrol as mammals and birds find the toehold they need to survive. No one believes the pythons will ever be fully eradicated, but the hope is that in twenty years or so, the issue might lessen into something close to manageable.
Why I grew up in Houston
Reading the story (the eloquent narrative and amazing pictures are well worth your time), I thought about a Daily Article I wrote this week regarding the “law of unintended consequences.” Historians tell us that people’s actions, especially governments’ actions, always have unanticipated and thus “unintended” effects.
The invasion of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades illustrates my point.
I cannot imagine that the pet owners who let their pythons slither away into their backyards or people who constructed a breeding center destroyed by Hurricane Andrew could have had any idea that their actions would lead to this.
But they did.
We find this theme, for bad and for good, everywhere we look in Scripture. You and I are fallen because Adam and Eve fell, but we heard the gospel of salvation because the apostles told someone who told someone, and so on down the centuries to someone who told you. We are here because Noah built his ark; we have the Revelation because John was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Revelation 1:10).
The same law marches through the long corridors of human history. I am descended from sailors who braved the Atlantic to cross from England to the New World and from pioneers who trekked the plains and forded the rivers of the frontier in wagons. I grew up in Houston, Texas, because my father was transferred there as an air traffic controller with Braniff in the 1950s, and because my mother moved there with her employer from Kansas at the same time.
I heard about Jesus because two men knocked on my apartment door when I was fifteen and invited me to ride their bus to church. You are reading this article as a result as well.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” And so it must be. Unless we were to live in an absolute vacuum, our every motion affects the molecules around us that affect the molecules around them. As a result, there can be no “consequenceless” action.
So it is with the spiritual world as well.
When we sin, we affect those who are innocent. But when we are faithful, we affect those who are sinners. We cannot help making a difference every day of our lives. But we can choose the difference we make.
Choose wisely today.
Search
