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Don't know why that tried and true idea has lost so much favor.

Back in the late 1960s, the Minnesota county where my brother and I did farm work every summer for Dad, decided there were too many gophers and announced a 25 cent bounty for gopher tails. They made it convenient too. Every town with a population of 500 or more designated a local merchant (usually the same place which sold fishing licenses) to process the bounty claims.

Further, even with traps costing 75 cents each at the local hardware store, my brother and I pooled our funds to buy 10 traps which produced a daily yield of about 70%.

Midway into the first week, the traps were paid off and we were making pure profit of $1.75 per day just trapping gophers in our spare time. By the end of the summer, we had $150 to split in addition to our farm work earnings. $75 bought a whole lot of stuff in those days.

At the end of the next summer, the county decided the gophers weren't such a big problem anymore and discontinued the program. It seems a lot of kids were doing exactly the same thing my brother and I were doing.

Furthermore, our cats dined well on gopher meat. What the cats didn't eat were fed to the hogs.

There was a article a few years ago in Wall Street Journal about the invasive brown tree snakes on Guam.

They offered a bounty, and it was only about a month before they found someone breeding brown tree snakes in their back yard for the bounty.

I actually agree with you, but there needs to be some sort of proviso that it is for snakes 4 feet long or longer or something to make it not profitable to raise for the bounty.

Of course, the problem is that would lead to a flock of ordinary citizens actually using the Everglades, and as we all know, places like that are only for government agents and their cronies.

Offer $10 per foot bounty, problem solved.

There have been python-hunting competitions in Florida for at least the past 2 years. The results were very disappointing. A few dozen snakes were caught, I think. Not hundreds or thousands. They are very hard to find in the swamps and trees of Florida.

FL has had a python hunt in the Everglades for the past four years. It has not made a dent in the population. They are very elusive and have no natural enemies.

Pythons are wiping out the small mammal population in the Everglades. Putting a hurt on birds as well.

They are experimenting with pheromones to see if they can lure males into traps. That’s probably more promising than hunters going sloshing around in the Everglades which presents its own set of ecological problems.