Chomp by Carl Hiaasen

Once I read one of the Hiaasen YAs, I had to go looking for the rest of them. Mainly, I wanted to make sure they were stand alone novels and not part of some series. Turns out that they are all stand alones, which for my purposes, is a good thing.

Chomp is about Wahoo Cray, the son of a professional animal wrangler. Apparently, this is a real thing. Animal wranglers are professionals who work with non domesticated animals by removing them from inappropriate locations and, in some cases, rehabilitating injured animals and training them. These animals are then sometimes used as stand ins for their wild counterparts in nature shows and documentaries. Who knew? I learn something new every day and from the strangest places.

Anyway, Wahoo's father gets hired to wrangle for a reality tv show reminiscent of "Crocodile Hunter."  The difference is that Steve Irwin was actually a fairly competent wrangler himself. Derek Badger, the TV personality in Chomp is a egotistical and generally useless person who I pretty much immediately wanted to punch in the face. Wahoo's dad seems to agree with me. 

Wahoo and his dad have to keep this yahoo alive in the Florida Everglades as everything proceeds to go wrong.

This is a fast paced book. As always with Hiaasen's YA, ecological concerns are front and center but not the main thrust of the plot. There were two things that I found particularly interesting. First, apparently Burmese Pythons have become a major invasive species in southern Florida. I used to keep a ball python when I was younger. However, I lived in Michigan so if my python got away from me, it was unlikely that it was going to have much of an environmental impact. South Florida however has a very hospitable climate to a python's way of thinking. The problem is that the Burmese Pythons get big enough to successfully kill a human and have no natural predators in the Florida everglades so they are pretty much running rampant. There is an actual campaign to exterminate them. Interesting stuff.

Second, Chomp really got me thinking about nature programming and reality tv. The line between educational/informational programming and entertainment has become blurred in recent years. This is having many deleterious effects.  Nature shows, like the one described in Chomp, encourage a certain contempt for the natural world. I think when they started, the idea was to educate and raise awareness, but somewhere along the way, they turned into idiots doing stupid dangerous things and surviving it. I'm not opposed to entertainment, but when it's presented as fact oriented educational programming, people believe it's real.  This is a problem and it's one that Chomp obliquely addresses.