Community Chat

[KathyPet]

Biggest python ever! my snake fear meter is through the roof!

[chocolatelab]

I am definitely scared of snakes. I will take snow over snakes any day of the week.

[sidsmom]

Animal Planet has a "Animal Police" type of show from Dade County. Always rescuing snakes out of neighborhoods. HUGE python problem down there. Hoogie!!! A good visualization, if you're in a home with 9ft ceilings....look up & up & up through the roof!!

[Burnsite]

I don't mind snakes, but I had a baby python in my house and didn't know it.

My cat Percy, who thinks he is a watch dog, alerted me to the snakelet while I was on the computer.

I rolled snakelet up in a towel and put him outside. I thought he looked a little different from a racer snake (good snakes, they eat rats and vermin) who live in my yard. A racer snake once entered, on a QVC parcel, my house. Percy told me about the racer snake, too. It was scarier to remove than the python was but it was bigger.

Anyhow, I saw that weird snake a few weeks later and it looked really strange, almost like a rattlesnake. It had grown by 6X or more. (We do have rats around, because our neighborhood has citrus trees. Rats love citrus, who doesn't?

My yard guy, Don, when I told him about the weird snake that got big so fast said, "It's a reticulated python, B, they are in my neighborhood, too (about 1/4 mile away). He saw it later but couldn't catch it. He said it was huge by then.

He wanted it for a pet. He has a menagerie over at his house. I would have called Animal Control if I had known it was a python, but it was just a baby and didn't yet look like much. It was about a foot long, but clearly a baby. Very angry to be rolled in a towel, but so had the racer snake. Snakes don't like to be messed with.

Don told me it had smelled my cats and wanted them. They feed on warm blooded animals. Shudder.

[boby]

People get exotic animals as pets and then cut them loose when they become too big, too expensive to maintain, or both.

A couple of years ago someone fished a piranha out of a lake on Long Island. Don't know how it survived, since they're not cool water fish.

Pythons are a big problem in Florida because they have no natural enemies. One killed an alligator and died trying to eat the thing.

Not sure what the solution is as long as some folks want pets who can eat everybody else's pets for lunch.

[Lila Belle]

[brii]

That's a big snake. Yikes !

[Suziepeach]

Maybe they'll have another round up- that is scary as hail..

[RedTop]

I have read many stories about the pythons in Florida, and find this quite scary. Three years ago, my cousin in Georgia forwarded me a picture of a huge 8 foot python that was killed on a golf course less than 10 miles from his home. I feel sure Florida will continue to have a snake issue for years to come, but the reality is that these snakes are traveling, and will continue to travel in search of a food source. I do not think it is impossible for these snakes to turn up in SC, NC, TN, VA and even WV, as they will adapt to their surroundings.

In WV, we are on the watch for water mocassins, copperheads and timber rattlers. We also frequently see, or hear about large king snakes around us. Just this summer, a cousin who lives close by saw a king snake wrapped inside her grapevine, and said the head was huge--wider than her hands put together. Several days after that she saw the slither marks in the grass from the grapevine to the barn, and estimates this snake is more than 10 feet long. We already have our own big snakes to deal with!

[olivia1123]

This Dade county resident is just thrilled to hear that