From Zoo To Retail Neglect

People are incredibly careless. Unfortunately when people in authority are careless there are sometimes dreadful casualties as a result. In a moment of carelessness, an inability to logically assess a situation and imagine what could possibly go awry, two very young boys are dead. Because nothing had gone wrong up until that fateful night when a large snake got loose and did what nature had intended it to do, it seems those who had the care and responsibility of two little boys never envisaged what might happen - and did.

Authorities in the New Brunswick town of Campbellton had received a number of complaints regarding the operation of the Reptile Ocean shop that catered to lovers of reptiles. Some of whom were repulsed at the condition in which those reptiles were kept along with the state of their health. Not only were municipal authorities seemingly disinterested in responding to those complaints, no one seemed interested in determining whether it was legal to keep an African rock python, assuming it was. Parents are in position of authority over their children; it is similarly assumed they are alert to the best interests of their children's welfare.

This is the text dating from 2009 describing the entry of African rock pythons that began to invade the Florida Everglades, along with a few other constrictor-type snakes not native to North America:

Six African rock pythons have been found in Florida since 2002. More troubling, a pregnant female and two hatchlings have been found, which means the aggressive reptiles have set up house.
More dangerous than even Burmese pythons—which are known to eat alligators (alligator-python picture)—the African pythons are "so mean, they come out of the egg striking," said Kenneth Krysko, senior herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
"This is just one vicious animal."

And this is what was recently in the news of snake invasions in the Florida Everglades:

The biggest Burmese python ever caught in Florida — 17 feet, 7 inches (5.18 metres) long and 164 1/2 pounds (74.4 kilograms) — was found in Everglades National Park, the University of Florida announced Monday.

REUTERS/Florida Museum of Natural History at University of Florida/Handout   Researchers 
 transport the largest Burmese python found to date in Florida in preparation to examine its 
internal anatomy in this still image taken from video at the Florida Museum of Natural History 
in Gainesville, Florida.

Tens of thousands of Burmese pythons are believed to be living in the Everglades, where they thrive in the warm, humid climate. While many were apparently released by their owners, others may have escaped from pet shops during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and have been reproducing ever since.
The snakes kill their prey by coiling around it and suffocating it. They have been known to swallow animals as large as deer and alligators.

Constrictors crush their prey. They kill them by suffocating them; when the struggling has ceased, they slowly crush them beyond death. As the muscularly coiled body applies additional pressure, bones crack, so that no resistance can be met when the giant snake unhinges its jaws and proceed to swallow its prey whole, slowly digesting it over a prolonged period of time to nourish its body to enable it to grow ever larger.

What constrictors are capable of doing can be no secret to anyone who professes to be a connoisseur of reptiles. Yet knowing what such a beast is capable of, and should be respected for -- its capacity to wreak havoc on any animal -- seems to have eluded the attention of Jean-Claude Savoie, owner of the Reptile Ocean enterprise in Campbellton, New Brunswick.

Mr. Savoie appears to have been fascinated with reptiles, without fully understanding their natural habits. He is certainly not alone in this. People become enamoured of the idea of having in their possession such animals -- as though they represent pets that can be domesticated -- reptiles like alligators and these giant species of dangerous snakes, while they seem incapable of understanding the danger they represent to human life.

The condition of the reptiles kept by Reptile Ocean has come under question; it would appear there were complaints of animal abuse, of sick animals not cared for, by people who bought them from the source and discovered them to have been maltreated. Evidently nothing was done to alter the situation.

And Mr. Savoie saw fit to keep his African rock python, 14 to 16 feet long and close to 100 pounds in an 'enclosure' upstairs over his shop, in his private personal apartment where he lived with his son. His son's playmates who live nearby, four and seven years of age, Noah and Connor Barthe, were visiting and having a sleep-over. Mourning relatives later said the two little boys had a lovely day before meeting death; they went swimming, enjoyed a barbecue, played with their best friend.

 

July 2013 photo of Noah Barthe and Connor Barthe. Facebook

 

The snake appears to have manoeuvred its way out of the enclosure and from there entered the building's ventilation system. The massive snake's weight caused it to fall through the ceiling of the room where the two little boys were sleeping. The theory is that the snake wound itself around one of the little boys and the other woke, and tried to pull his brother away, leading the snake to wind around the second little boy as well, smothering them both. An autopsy is to be conducted.

Campbellton's mayor, while mourning the deaths, advised that there was nothing illegal in the ownership of the snake, that all the permits for Reptile Ocean were in order.  What happened was an unfortunate accident, a tragedy of immense proportions, but an accident. Well, it certainly was that. But charges may yet be laid against Mr. Savoie.

It would appear his ownership of an African rock snake was not at all authorized, it represented a clear illegality. The breed is not included on the Exotic Wildlife Registry for New Brunswick, according to the province's Department of Natural Resources. The province never issues permits "to keep an illegal exotic animal as a pet."


No problem, though in other municipalities and provinces and states in North America.