How to Catch a Gator
I spent most of last week in Gainesville, Florida at a technology conference. We stayed here, which is right on the University of Florida campus. Also on the University of Florida campus is a lake with alligators.
Now, it seems to me that if you had to list the top ten things that should not be mixed together, college students and alligators would be right up near the top of the list. I guess they don't lose a lot of students, but man, we just have ground squirrels and rabbits on our campus. I walked around the lake one afternoon while I was there and I have to say I was sorta creeped out by the whole alligators right there in the water thing.
The other night, after I got back from the conference, I was watching Miami Animal Precinct on Animal Planet. A man was called in to remove an alligator from a sinkhole at Monkey Jungle (I don't think that was really the name, but it was some tourist attraction that involved lots and lots of monkeys). Apparently they had bought the alligator several years ago as a tourist attraction (in case the monkeys weren't interesting enough) and now it was big and cranky and they were afraid they were going to start losing monkeys (or college students).
So this, I swear, is how you catch a gator in a sinkhole:
First, you put a ladder in the sinkhole, at which the gator disappears because apparently it knows what's coming. Then you and your two assistants go down in the sinkhole and take off your shoes (because it's a sinkhole and it's muddy). Then, you get in the water (yes, that's right, in the water with the monkey-eating alligator) and you start feeling around with your feet for the gator (it is at this point that I said to the television--'Oh my God!'). This occasionally pisses the gator off.
When, in your careful feeling around, you actually touch the gator, you next need to determine (and I'm thinking pretty damn quick) whether you are touching the gator head or the gator tail. If you are touching the gator head, you carefully determine which direction the gator tail is in because you actually want the gator tail, not the gator head (for, I would think, obvious reasons).
--And if you're wondering how I know all this, it's because the guy explained it to the camera while he was feeling around for the gator.--
When you get ahold of the gator tail you loop your rope around it and pull on the tail until the gator gets pissed off and its head comes up--he didn't say this, but I'm guessing it helps to know where the gator's head is before you do this as you wouldn't want your assistant to be standing right in gator jaw snapping territory. It's probably hard to get new assistants for this sort of thing. Anyway, when the gator's head comes up, you quick get a rope around it and voila, caught gator.
Yeah, I'm not taking this up as a profession anytime soon either.
This guy said he's caught over a hundred gators and never gotten bit (before this, because this gator actually did bite him--and an assistant.) And, having watched one other episode of Miami Animal Precinct I know that there are other ways to catch gators who are living in more open water and not in monkey-infested sinkholes. But seriously, you couldn't pay me.