Iguana Problems?

Heck, even the local carnival is called "Carnaval del Jamo"

Today I want to talk about something that I found intriguing, last night I saw a post by Hive account@pouchon about Florida asking for iguanas to be killed because they are becoming a pest. Well I was raised in a town in what is known as the Aguan Valley in Honduras where the people have a nickname "ComeJamos" which is basically iguana eaters, a Jamo is a brown iguana. And it is true the people there love to eat iguanas, I have eaten them but find it not so thrilling, you know you are eating a lizard, but it doesn't taste bad and the meat looks like chicken. When cooked with coconut it is actually quite tasty.

Now the people there especially the rural folks are very good at hunting iguanas, they sometimes use a long stick with a looped string and catch them by the neck, some people use rifles, others use slingshots and some actually go after them and just take a huge jump to catch them while they are running, I knew one of these guys and he was the best goalkeeper in the whole valley.

They also have another method that is quite weird,, see iguanas usually come out during the day and will climb a tree or big rocks to catch the sun's heat but if they feel threatened they will run for it and try to get into their holes in the ground. Now I have seen some of these expert hunters go after an iguana and they just put their arm into those holes until they catch the iguana and pull it out. There is no way that I would put my hand in one of those holes, you know snakes also like to hide in holes in the ground.

And we have all types of iguanas here, the big green ones, the smaller brown ones and one type that is quite small and is about red in color, this one is a very aggressive iguana and you have to be very careful with them because they bite.

Now what I am getting to is that after decades or maybe centuries of killing iguanas they eventually started getting scarce and of course quite expensive, a big iguana runs for about $20.00 and it doesn't have much meat. But you see they got scarce because the best part of the iguana and what people are willing to pay a lot for are the eggs, they are good I can vouch for that, but of course this started having an impact on the iguana population.

And now I am happy to say, many people in the valley who own farms or some large tracts of land have taken it upon themselves to preserve them, nobody touches them in these areas so I expect the population to slowly return to what it was or at least leave the near extinction numbers.

But what I was really thinking is Mr. Trump could send for a few hundreds of these iguana hunters and a few of the women who know how to cook them and set them up in Florida, they would take care of the iguana population explosion and with iguana restaurants it is probably a program that could pay for itself. Think that would be a good idea?