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Dear Husband snapped this fellow catching some Autumn Rays. Or was he waiting to catch something else?
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- Alligator near Okefenokee
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bearspawprint 
About fifteen years back there was a woman in my metro area who had a house full, and I do mean FULL of caymans and alligators.She’d cared for them for years until a little local private school went there for a field trip and one of the parents heard about the big lizards and guess what happened next. The woman had ‘rescued’ the critters from people who had thougth they’d make good pets–over the years she aquired a large number of them. They had the run of a fenced yard, complete with pools, the basement and the two lover floors of her three story home. Her neighbors knew and did not mind as they thought she was providing a service to the animals and the people who didn’t want them once they grew too large.
I’m not kidding.
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Too bad she didn’t get herself licensed there would have been some requirements in fencing and sewage and such for her own and other’s safety. And preschoolers would not be allowed, except in special SAFE circumstances, to be there. Sheesh!! Without parental prior consent? It does seem, to me, that if she could afford all the meat needed, she could afford to do it right. Or is that were other, uhm, unwanted meat sources were disposed of…..???
Where do people get all of these illegal animals?
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Oh there were NO preschoolers in the group. And there WAS indeed parental consent.And parental escorts for the group. This was not a secret. I don’t believe there were issues in HOW she was handling the animals. The issue was that she even had them within the city limits.
The where of all the illegal animals that were dumped and abandoned in addition to the others that found their way to her doorstep in the course of a dozen years—well, I think it’s got to do with the black market business. But what do I know? Not much more than what I’m written here. Just thought it made an odd side note that even here in the midwestern states such critters come one way or another.
Hi again.
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Amazing. “Tis interesting.
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They can hibernate. Dunno about caymans, but alligators can hibernate.
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Good thing that was the only snapping that was going on! 🙂
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There were snapping turtles 🙂 But they didn’t get pictures taken that day.
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Now those things will chase you down! I grew up in the country and has many a time from them!:D
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Haahaha yup
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If I were him I would have taken that alligator home with me. Why not?
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Hahahaha
https://bearspawprint.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/veterans-day-2013-in-the-okefenokee-swamp/#jp-carousel-11134 I snapped this picture at the same moment, turned in the opposite direction. 🙂 If the alligator had been hungry, he would be dead, but we still would not have been able to take him home. I have seen alligators , when “our” river was high, within sight of our house. MUCH bigger ones … but not when I had a camera in hand. We don’t need to bring alligators from elsewhere home. They are already here. 🙂 And they are still protected.
I have eaten them, though not killed by my husband.
When I was a child, in South Florida, my Mother hunted HUGE 15′ to 20′ alligators that don’t seem to exist most places now. State hunters cull the really big ones if they know about them. There were many many more alligators and not so many people in Florida, when I was a child. Foolish tourists could even take baby alligators home as pets. Then.
However:
1. This alligator lives in a Game Preserve 2. Alligators are protected. 3. There is , some years, a short season with limited licenses in restricted areas in Florida. I don’t know about Georgia. This was Georgia. 3. Even with all appropriate licenses in legal areas it is illegal to discharge a firearm from a public roadway. Pictured is a public road. 4. While the picture was taken seven or eight miles from home, as the crow flies, it is across a state line. Special Out of State licenses are required to hunt game out of state, and it must be counted and tagged before it can be taken home, and checked again before being transported across state lines.
Out of sight of the camera is the truck we were riding in, it really would not have been necessary to kill the gator with the safety of the truck so close, but if we reported an attack, the gator would have been killed by the Rangers as a nuisance. 😦 Firearms are not even allowed in game preserves because of the temptation of poaching.
Caymans live in your islands, don’t they? Do you take them home to your house?
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Alligators and crocodiles are protected animal in my country so are Caymans. We don’t keep them as pet at home unless we have the license for keeping them.
When I lived in Borneo, there were so many huge river crocodiles around and they often eat people and children in where most of the villagers took a bath at the river bank. One day I saw the villagers caught a huge one ( 6 meters long) and taken out of the water by a crane. This animal have eaten a woman at night.
On Java Island, the alligators and crocodiles live in estuaries, not in up further the land because of no deep river.
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You lived in Borneo as a child? I didn’t know alligators lived in Indonesia along with your caymans and crocodilians.
Alligators still occasionally eat a child or kill an adult. About the same frequency as shark attacks, which is not so much. 6 meters was fairly common when I was a child, but is rare, now. It takes a gator 40 years or so to get that big and they are smarter than they look. To live that long, anymore, they have to be quite crafty and sly. The bigger fellows know to stay away from people. People used to know to stay away from the gators, but now it seems the gators are expected to understand human rules.
Do you know of legends and prophecies concerning crocodiles and caymans? Are there any written in English? There are some concerning alligators made by the original native peoples of Florida. I’ve not found them written down. Yet. Might be written down in some Jesuit archive, but I dunno. I don’t know Latin, either. so much is being lost with languages being lost. 😦
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The caymans is extinct now like the Javan tiger. I am not sure if the legend in English version is available. I have read many local legends written in our national language when I was at elementary school but we never found the book anymore. I heard that there are so many languages being lost in our world. it sounds really bad, doesn’t it?
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😦
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eeeeek! I would not hang about to find out just what he is after !!! xxxxxxxxxxxx
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Probably a good idea.
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😉
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Yike that will wake you up more than a cup of Jo!
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Helps keep the coyotes down 🙂
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