佛罗里达办蟒蛇猎捕赛发奖金，一人十天抓到 96 条

Ten days. Ninety-six snakes.

That is what one man caught.

His name is Tom Rahill, and this year he took home ten thousand dollars.

This is not hunting for sport — it is a real job in Florida.

In the south of Florida there is a huge stretch of land called the Everglades.

It is wetland: part water, part ground. Walk in and the water comes up to your legs.

There are fish in there, birds, all kinds of animals.

But in recent years, the animals there have been getting fewer and fewer.

Why?

Because something else has multiplied: pythons.

Pythons are big and long — the longest can reach five metres.

They do not bite people; they swallow small animals whole.

The thing is, the Everglades never had pythons to begin with.

Pythons came from Asia.

In the 1970s, a lot of Americans started keeping pythons as pets.

When they are small they look nice, and they are not big.

But they grow, and grow, until they are too big to keep at home.

Some people simply released them outside.

And once, a big storm wrecked a facility where pythons were bred, and the snakes all escaped.

Once they reached the Everglades, the pythons found the place perfect.

Warm weather, plenty of food, and no natural predator — no other animal there eats them.

So they just kept breeding and kept growing.

How many pythons are in Florida now?

Nobody can say for sure.

Some say a hundred thousand. Some say three hundred thousand.

Over these years the rabbits, the rats and the small birds of the Everglades have almost all disappeared.

The local animals are no match for a snake from somewhere else.

Florida tried many things, and finally came up with an unusual one: hold a contest.

Anyone can enter, and whoever catches the most pythons takes the prize money.

This year's contest ran for only ten days.

More than nine hundred people came, from thirty states, and some flew in from Canada and from Vietnam.

In ten days they caught two hundred and eighty snakes in total.

The one who caught the most was Tom Rahill.

He alone caught ninety-six — roughly a third of everyone's total.

This was not his first time.

Tom Rahill has been catching pythons for well over ten years.

He also founded a place called Swamp Apes.

Swamp Apes is for veterans and first responders.

A veteran is someone who used to be a soldier and has now come home.

Many of them, after coming back from a war, cannot sleep at night and do not much feel like talking to people.

Tom Rahill takes them into the wetland — walking together, hunting snakes together.

Out there, they have something to do together again.

During this year's contest he even helped a veteran catch a very big snake.

At this point, a question has probably already occurred to you.

Two hundred and eighty snakes in ten days — but Florida has a hundred thousand pythons.

Do the maths and the contest looks pointless.

Ecologists say the same thing: a contest alone will never clear them out.

But they also say the contest does something else.

It tells a lot of people who had no idea about any of this that the Everglades is in trouble.

For Tom Rahill and the others, it is simpler than that.

One python fewer means the small animals of the Everglades have a slightly better chance of surviving.

Think about it: if the animals outside your door were suddenly eaten up by an animal from somewhere else, what would you do?