State hunts pythons: leathergoods firm to benefit
18/03/2010
A specialist producer of exotic leather and leathergoods in Hallandale Beach, Florida, is receiving an unexpected boost to its raw material supply.
All American Gator, as the name suggests, relies mostly on alligator skins, which come into the leather pipeline as a result of legal, time-limited, annual hunting seasons every year in several southern states of the US. The company produces leather and leathergoods from the skins.
In recent days, the state of Florida has announced that numbers of another reptile, the Burmese python, have become so great that they are now a menace in several parts of the state. As a result, the authorities have sanctioned a hunt for the snakes in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
All American Gator president, Brian Wood, has announced that he will pay $5 for each hunted python, saying he will cook the meat for his family and use the skins in his business. In the first few days of the state-approved hunt, Florida residents delivered three dead pythons to the company.
The Burmese python first arrived in the US as a pet. Continued imports and domestic breeding have seen numbers rise substantially, resulting in many pythons living in the wild there now, with the Florida Everglades providing an ideal habitat. Invasive species colonize so rapidly because they have no proper competitors in their new environment. A single snake can lay one hundred eggs every three months. In Asia, jackals, monitor lizards, disease, and parasites limit the number of Burmese pythons, but in the Everglades, once they reach up to two years old, they have very few predators.
Local environmental agencies are concerned about the effect the snakes are having on the local fauna population, fearing that rare animals including the Florida panther, of which only 100 remain, could be under threat. In recent months, the environmental agencies have found a dead python with an alligator in its stomach, and another with two Key Largo wood rats in its gut. The Key Largo wood rat is a local species of rodent of which only 200 are believed to remain.
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