I’m not sure if you’ve heard, the Florida Everglades has a massive problem. Invasive Burmese pythons; measuring up to 20ft in length and weighing up to 200lbs. They are decimating native animals and ruining the precious Everglades ecosystem.

What if this problem could be turned into a money making opportunity? What a side hustle! It sure sounds more exciting than completing online surveys! It’s time for Profit Pants to explore.

It All Started With A Hurricane

For the origin of this problem we need to go back, back to August of 1992. People loved pythons, they kept them as exotic pets, a display of excess, they were sold in pet stores and were relatively under control. Everything was fine and dandy.

And then came Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 hurricane which caused an estimated $27 billion of damage to Southeast USA. Included in the damage list were stores, lots of them, including exotic pet stores. Just imagine the scene, gators, iguanas, snakes and anything and everything else you could imagine, crawling out from beneath the rubble. The pythons were on the loose.

Pythons had long been popular as a pet in Florida, and while some had been released into the Everglades before Andrew, by owners who could no longer care for them, it was this hurricane which truly escalated the Everglades problem to catastrophic levels.

Kings of Everglades

Burmese pythons have no real predators in the Everglades, they are at the top of the food chain alongside alligators. The warm humid temperature, the abundant food sources, no predators, females laying up to 100 eggs at a time; the perfect storm. The impact is that many animals native to the Everglades; raccoons, foxes, bobcats, opossums, have all but been eliminated.

A Creative (and Lucrative) Solution

Florida needed a solution, and quick, before the native animals would be gone completely and the Everglades ecosystem forever ruined. Baiting and trapping programs would be one option, another would be to send government rangers in to try and capture them. But this is a severe problem, so a solution just as wild was required.

Enter, the “Python Hunter”.

There are over 100 of these python hunters authorized to hunt within the Everglades.

Their mission, should they choose to accept it, is to head out into the wilds of the Everglades. They use bicycles, cars, trucks, boats, and their feet, to search the lands high and low. They’ll spend hours and hours looking down into the long grasses, eyes peeled for the distinctive patterns and colors of the Burmese python. At the same time they look out of the corner of their eye to make sure that they aren’t stepping on an alligator or anything else that bites.

And when they do locate their target, only half the battle has been done, they’ll still then need to capture it. Often this involves leaping through the air, snatching the beast just behind the head, in an attempt to gain control without being punctured by one of a hundred teeth.

Snake now under control, into the bag it goes.

How Much Can Python Hunters Earn?

In 2018 the published rewards were:

• $200 per python nest
• $50 base rate per captured python, plus $50/ft for every foot over 4ft.

Let’s price those out, considering that pythons in the area can grow up to around 20ft.

• 4ft: $200
• 6ft: $300
• 10ft: $500
• 15ft: $750
• 20ft: $1000

While a 20ft’er would be a record-breaker, and some days can and do result in nothing at all, it also isn’t unusual for a hunter to catch multiple snakes in a single hunt. That’s a pay day of $500 or more.

Progress?

The Python Hunting program began around 2016. We are now more than 5 years on, and while a lot of the results are anecdotal, reports are that the hunters are finding it significantly more difficult to locate pythons now than they did at the start of the program.

Want To See More?

Inspiration for this article came from binge-watching the Python Cowboy YouTube channel. The Python Cowboy doesn’t limit himself to pythons, with iguanas and wild hogs (other major problems in Florida) also on the hit list. A self-labelled conservationist, he lets nothing go to waste, with python meat becoming pet food, and the skins turned into wallets and other products. Note that Profit Pants is in no way affiliated to the Python Cowboy.

Final Thoughts

They say that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. While catching pythons can be rough and dangerous, I suspect that the python hunters of the Everglades wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

====

Your next steps? Hit one of the “SHARE” buttons below and then head back to our front page and check out more strange money articles.

• Previous article: Ransom Insurance (Hostage Insurance) – Travelling to a high risk country? Did you know that there is an insurance policy that can cover you in the event of being taken hostage?

• Next article: One Billion Dollars Wouldn’t Change The Majority Of My Day – We’ve all heard people say “I would change everything if I won the lottery”, I have said it myself many times. But is it really the truth, that nothing at all would be the same? Perhaps the answer isn’t what you would expect.

• View a list of all of our articles