WILD SNAKES HAVE BEEN LIVING PEACEFULY BY LONDON CANAL FOR DECADES - NOW AUTHORITIES WANT TO MURDER THEM for no good reason - Snakes feed on rats, which helps reduce number of GIANT RATS plaguing Britain

Maybe they help mitigate the problem of giant rat invasion of Britain, previously reported on this blog.

Regent's Canal - Photo Visit London.com

Daily Mail:  Of all the places you'd expect to find an 8ft snake that squeezes rats and birds to death, central London probably wouldn't be the first. 

 

But a colony of the beasts has been living beside the capital's Regent's Canal - despite being powerful enough to kill a small cat or dog. 

 

Now a row has broken out after a government quango said the snakes were an 'invasive species' which could be culled, even though they may have been living peacefully in the city for decades.

 

It is not known for certain where the snakes came from, but it is thought their ancestors may have escaped several years ago from London Zoo.  They are native to central Europe and are already a foot long when they hatch, before growing to their adult length of four to five feet. Some have been recorded growing up to 8ft long.

 

Aesculapian Snake - Daily Mail

The snakes are non-venomous, and instead kill small animals by constricting them.

 

But now the animals face a possible cull after a government quango, the London Invasive Species Initiative, marked them as a 'non-native species of high concern'.  The quango put the species in its second highest-priority group and said the snakes would require 'control, management, eradication etc.'  It added staff would have to 'establish ecology, breeding sites and methods of removal'. 

 

The plans come despite a colony of the animals having lived peacefully for several decades in north Wales after they escaped from the Welsh Mountain Zoo, in Colwyn Bay. 

 

Dr Wolfgang Wuster of Bangor University, who works with the Welsh colony, hit out at the plans as a possible waste of resources. 

 

He said: 'Any attempt to eradicate the Aesculapian snake would require justification of resources to be devoted to an almost certainly non-problematic introduced species with little prospects of spread, as opposed to the many far more damaging species already out there.  'From a wider and more philosophical point of view, we should ask ourselves what we can really conserve.'

 

'Given the near certainty of massive global climate change over the next century, the idea that we can treat the UK fauna and flora like some kind of pre-industrial vicarage garden and preserve it forever without any changes is simply farcical.' 

 

LISI manager Karen Harper said: '[The] Aesculapian snake species is listed in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, meaning it is illegal to allow the species to spread or escape into the wild.  'At present there is limited information on what affects the species may have on our local ecosystems.'

 

Source

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2625003/London-hit-outbreak-invasive-eight-foot-SNAKES-kill-cats-small-dogs.html

 

 

RELATED

 

Maybe those peaceful snakes that don't hurt humans are reducing the number of giant rats plaguing London. 

 

Britain under the invasion of giant rats the size of cats. 

http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2014/04/invasion-of-super-rats-size-of-cats.html

 

 

More on Aesculapian snakes

Their main food source are rodents up to the size of rats (a 130 cm adult specimen has been reported to have overpowered a 200g rat) and other small mammals such as shrews and moles. They also eat birds as well as bird eggs and nestlings. They suffocate their prey by constriction, though harmless smaller mouthfuls may be eaten alive without, or simply crushed on eating by jaws. Juveniles mainly eat lizards and arthropods, later small rodents. Other snakes and lizards are taken but found rarely only in adult prey.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculapian_Snake

 

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