Wild animals at safari a disaster in the making?
Published:Saturday | December 17, 2011 | 12:00 AM
THE EDITOR, Sir:
Jamaicans being caught up in the fever of the general election may have missed an article by Janet Silvera in The Gleaner's tourism magazine, Hospitality Jamaica, of December 7. The article informs us of new additions to the swamp safari in Falmouth.
Although I am an outdoor person and love nature, the thought of the new guests of the safari, namely, a Burmese python and a large anaconda, scares me, as I suffer from partial herpetophobia where snakes are concerned. Jamaican women especially suffer from full-blown herpetophobia because they fear a microscopic lizard more than a potentially vicious man, and I am not sure how they will react to those reptiles.
I have no doubt about Johnny Gourzong's good intentions and his ability to control those reptiles, but then accidents can happen. Can these reptiles reproduce, or have they been neutered? Although those snakes are not poisonous, they kill by entwining their prey, crushing them to death, before swallowing them. Watching them on some nature channel on TV, they can swallow a fairly large animal, including man. It is not a pretty sight to watch those hapless animals being swallowed that way.
Out of control
We have had a few experiences of good intentions gone wrong; some with disastrous consequences. The mongoose was introduced to kill rats and snakes in cane fields. They are now out of control. Cattle egrets introduced about 50 years ago to control cattle ticks are now the dominant white birds displacing the original black birds.
Farmers in Portland complain of deer destroying their crops. Obviously, these animals escaped from some zoo in Portland during Hurricane Gilbert, and, having no natural predators, breed freely. A great disaster in the making, however, is the proliferation of lionfish in our seas. It is said that a few of these fish escaped from some pet store in Florida during a hurricane not too long ago and are multiplying like wildfire, destroying economic fish in the process, thus threatening the fishing industry.
I invite Mr Gourzong to assure us that all will be well, while giving us a mini lesson on the relevant aspect of herpetology.
TREVOR SAMUELS