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South FL pythons
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by yoyoing on July 11, 2009
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South Florida journalist writes column about pythons:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2009/07/11/a1b_binocol_0712.htm
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RE: South FL pythons
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by yoyoing on July 11, 2009
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Second try with link:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/local_news/epaper/2009/07/11/a1b_binocol_0712.html
If this doesn't work; go to "opinions", "editorials", and "Frank Cerebino"
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RE: South FL pythons
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by yoyoing on July 12, 2009
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Text of above cited column:
"Column: Snake control? Heck no, that's un-American
By Frank Cerabino
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Is somebody going to speak up for big, deadly snakes?
I hope not. But it would be a very American thing to do.
Lucky for us, Burmese pythons don't have much juice with legislators. That's because snakes don't have their own NRA - which in their case might be the National Reptile Association.
So U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson's effort to create a federal ban on the importation and interstate sale of Burmese pythons may actually have some traction.
The Florida Democrat, testifying at a subcommittee meeting last week, brought the skin of a 16-foot Burmese python found in South Florida to bolster his warning that the pursuit of pet-owner happiness is outweighed by the havoc created by the spread of these dangerous living weapons.
"It's just a matter of time before one of these snakes gets to a visitor in the Everglades," Nelson said.
Snakes don't kill people ...
A snake NRA lobbyist would have pointed out that Nelson was overreacting to the death of a 2-year-old Sumter County girl who was strangled in her bed by a pet Burmese python that had been insufficiently confined in a glass case by the owner, the live-in boyfriend of the girl's mother.
And that lobbyist would stress that snakes don't kill people; people who take poor care of snakes kill people.
The lobbyist would also note that a day after Nelson's show-and-tell, and far closer to home, there was a bit of unanticipated menace from another kind of deadly weapon visited upon an unwary visitor to one of the most popular locales of the revered Florida visitor - a hotel bathroom.
A woman sitting on a toilet inside a stall at the Clarion Hotel in Tampa was shot in the leg when a gun fell from the holster of another woman who was using the adjacent stall.
"Instead of worrying about the infrequent and preventable tragedies caused by big snakes, how about doing something about the real menace of guns, which accidentally or intentionally injure and kill innocent Americans every day," the snake NRA spokesman would say. "When a woman using a public restroom in a tourist hotel has to worry about being shot by another woman who is legally carrying a loaded gun, then maybe we need to revisit sensible gun regulation."
Gracing flags, if not Constitution
OK, I know gun-rights advocates are waiting impatiently for me to point out that the Founding Fathers enshrined gun ownership in the Constitution and said nothing about snakes.
But the snake version of the NRA would speak to the central role that snakes have played in the American Revolution and as the emblematic creature in the animal world that our Founding Fathers did single out.
Ben Franklin's "Join, or Die" political cartoon depicted the 13 colonies as segments of a snake. And the image on one of our first battle flags was of a deadly rattlesnake with the words "Don't Tread on Me."
Yes, if there were more money in the snake business, we'd be one Toby Keith song away from making snake regulation seem as un-American as regulating handguns."
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