Posted on 07/11/2007 8:45:52 AM PDT by george76
After a night of desperate searching, a woman discovered the mutilated remains of her beloved cat on the muddy bank of a canal near her Cape Coral home. She believes a large, ravenous and invasive lizard committed the heinous act.
A now infamous name among Cape households, Nile monitors are cold- blooded predators introduced into the city sometime before 1990. These reptiles, which grow to a length of 7 feet, have proliferated, devouring just about everything in their path, including small mammals, snakes, shellfish, eggs and even juvenile alligators.
It was a Nile monitor that may have eaten Suzanne Spana's 16-year-old cat,”Kitty Largo.”
“We just found his paws and a little bit of his coat and some of his tail,” said Spana. “He was gone. There was nothing left of him.”
The city of Cape Coral’s only Nile monitor trapper, Robert Mondgock, answered Spana's distressed call after the incident and laid a trap baited with chicken parts Sunday on the canal bank where Kitty Largo died.
He found another cat’s collar near the kill site.
“I was thinking this was an isolated incident, but when he came back with another collar it just broke my heart,” said Spana.
Thousands of monitors live in burrows along the 400 miles of canals in the Cape, though an official population estimate does not exist. The lizards reproduce quickly: Females lay 60 to 80 eggs in a clutch every year.
(Excerpt) Read more at naplesnews.com ...
So, bring in a few Dragons of Komodo to harvest the monitors, then have annual Dragon hunts when the monitors are under control...
But keep the kitties and kids away from the canals in the meantime.
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