Comparison Essay On Pets

Pets can make great life companions by providing emotional support for people, and teach people responsibility. Though pets can offer many benefits to their owners, a large majority of people who get a non-native pet, like an iguana or a Burmese python, don’t realize how large these animals grow. Or, how difficult it can be to handle and train these wild creatures. This type of unknowing pet owners, unfortunately, will normally release their animals into to the wild. Following the animal’s release into a new ecosystem, some die, while others inhabit their new area and start to take over the land. When a foreign animal gets introduced into a new environment and rapidly outcompetes the native wildlife for resources, this new animal becomes known

All ecosystems survive on the balance of species present in the area. When new animals are brought into an area they can have detrimental effects. A prevalent example of an invasive destructive species is the Burmese python. This beautiful snake got introduced into the Florida Everglades ecosystem because many people wanted to own the majestic snakes as pets, but this had detrimental effects in this delicate part of Florida. The Burmese python could survive very easily in the warm swampy area of the Everglades because this habitat reflects the python’s homeland of Southeast Asia. “Since the mid-1990s, park rangers have captured or killed sixty-eight pythons (Brown 714).” Even though this is an older statistic, it shows that the population of Burmese pythons in the Florida area has been a problem for some time. Most of the snakes in Everglades National Park got there because many owners were not warned of how large these snakes can get, up to 20 feet, and subsequently release the animals into the wild when they can no longer take care of them. The pythons have become a real problem for the natural ecosystem in the park. For example, the Burmese python competes with the native Eastern Indigo snake for food and habitat