As the sun sets over the grassy swamps of the Florida Everglades, a group of military veterans gather around their trucks and discuss their plans. They are hunters and part of the nonprofit group Swamp Apes, created to help veterans overcome the difficulties of life after service by teaching them to hunt pythons as a form of therapy and community.
Aged between 30 and 70 years, Veterans are there for one purpose only: spend the night hunting pythons with your bare hands in the swamp until dawn.
Naysha Ramos, 31, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, stood as a spotter atop the bug-covered F-250 truck. She said seeing the pythons was not unlike patrols she had done in the Army. “You look out your 15 feet for snakes, out your 25 feet, and you keep your head swiveling for these pythons,” she said.
Florida has been paying about 100 contractors to round up the snakes year-round in a project shared by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the South Florida Water Management District. By 2023, more than 18,000 pythons will have been removed from the wild, with about 11,000 of them captured by contractors like Ramos.
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