From WSAZ.com:
An alligator is such a bizarre, unusual sight in the waters of the Upper Mud River that even seeing isn’t necessarily believing.
“I didn’t even tell my wife,” says Jack Stonestreet, who was fishing on the river last Thursday. “I didn’t tell her because, to be honest, I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”
Fishermen over the past several days contacted the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources to tell them of the gator sighting. On Saturday, Nick Huffman, a field superintendent with the DNR, saw the scaled reptile with his own eyes.
“I would say he’s a half grown alligator, a total measurement of 67 inches,” Huffman says. “That’s big enough I knew not to get on him in hand-to-hand combat.”
The DNR shot the alligator and pulled it out of the water.
The alligator will now be dissected. Opening the alligator’s stomach may give the DNR some insight as to where it may have come from and how long it was in the river.
West Virginia has almost no regulations on alligator ownership– probably because most people have sense enough not to own one!
But I have seen alligators and caimans available at pet stores, and every once in a while, someone releases a pet alligator into a river or lake in hopes that it will survive in the wild (I guess).
The problem is that alligators live only as far north as northeastern North Carolina. There is some debate about about them having an historical range into southeastern Virginia. I’ve always heard that the Great Dismal Swamp was the northern boundary, but I’ve also heard that alligators once ranged into the James River. In North Carolina, they are found only in the coastal plain, where the winters are comparatively mild. My guess is if they were found in Virginia at one time, they were never found out of the extreme southeastern part of the state, and if they did occur in the James River, my guess is they were found only near the coast.
If they aren’t found outside of North Carolina’s coast plain, how on earth could they survive in West Virginia?
People are amazingly dumb about animals. Alligators are not good pets. I’m surprised I had to type that sentence. An alligator can eat you. It has very powerful jaws and a relatively small brain. And although they are smarter than, say, iguanas or box turtles, they are about the same level of intelligence as a chicken. Powerful jaws and a small brain are a combination a combination for a dangerous pet.
Oh, yeah, and you need a massive heated enclosure that contains both a swimming area and a basking area, which has to be cleaned on a regular basis.
But if you get one and live in one of these states that has an actual winter, please don’t dump it in the local river. It’s either going to freeze to death or someone is going to shoot it.
There is no “born free” scenario that works out well for the alligator.
But some people just don’t care.
***
One of the most interesting alligator populations that has been established outside their normal range is the Tennessee River in northern Alabama. Most of these are on the Wheeler Lake Reservoir.
Alligators are native to southern Alabama, but they were introduced to the Tennessee River at some point in the 1960’s or 1970’s.
These alligators are outside their native range, and they also are living in a somewhat cooler climate than they normally would experience.
However, even northern Alabama has much milder winters than West Virginia, and there is no chance of them ever becoming established here.
Do you think climate change may mean more such animals moving north? Today in the south of England we are experiencing the arrival of a species (new to Europe) of asian hornet, crossing the channel from France. Its ancestors had arrived in France a few years back – in a consignment of timber say the the reports. But back on your alligator thread, in our paper today is a picture of a massive 727 pound alligator reported to have been shot while swimming (and minding his own business) in the Mississipi at a place called Vicksburg. That seems to be the reaction over there, instead of celebrating and protecting new additions to the fauna, just simply shoot them in case no one believes it. That said, maybe alligators and hornets are not the most likely immigrants to receive a welcome anywhere.
Meanwhile, today in a part of south west England the guns are out at night aimed at killing 5000 badgers in a controversial cull to study what effect it will have on controlling bovine TB. A previous local cull a few years ago failed as the surviving badgers wandered far and joined other colonies. An effective vaccine is needed of course.
They might be able to make it up to the middle parts of Virginia, but I can tell you that they don’t live in places like the Atlanta area of Georgia, which climate change models say that West Virginia will eventually have.
We will get armadillos pretty soon though.
Vicksburg was a massive citadel on the Mississippi River during the Civil War. General Grant got his fame for taking it in a long and drawn out siege.
When I was a kid a friend of mine bought a “baby alligator” (probably a caiman) at a pet shop. At first he kept it in an aquarium, but as it grew he moved it to a large tub in the basement. One summer, feeling sorry for it down in the now too small small tub in the semi dark basement, we took it to a pond in the cow pasture behind his father’s barn and let it go. At that time it was about two feet long. We enjoyed watching the ‘gator’ swim around the pond all summer, and it would even come and get fish and frogs we threw to it. Near the end of that August we used a long seine net, and with my friend on one side of the pond and me on the other, we dredged the pond and caught the ‘alligator’. It had grown a little, and my friend put it back in its tub in the basement for the winter.
He repeated this process over the next several years, and I can remember being a teenager and going down to the pond with my friend and watching that alligator swim around. We often passed the pond when we were out in the fields woodchuck hunting, and sometimes saw it sunning itself on the banks. It would always slide into the water when it saw us, but didn’t seem too frightened once it was in the water. The last time I saw it it must have been over three feet long.
Then one August I went to help my friend catch it, and it was nowhere to be seen. We used the net and dredged the pond over and over, but never found that alligator. An interesting note is that the pasture around the pond was fairly flat, but about fifty yards to the southwest it dropped off to a steep slope that ran about 300 yards down to the banks of a river called the Otter Creek. This river runs about six miles northwest to Lake Champlain which is around 140 miles long and drains into the Saint Lawrence in Canada. So that alligator/caiman could have gotten a good distance from my friends farm. It probably died the first Vermont (or Canadian) winter it experienced.
Recently pythons have been found killed in Vermont roads, these are probably released animals experiencing their first summer of freedom, though one may be able to survive if it finds a place underground to “hole up” until warm weather comes around again. Recently strange animals seem to be popping up all over in places where they shouldn’t be.
It’s ridiculous how easily available alligators are as pets. I’ve seen them in pet stores, and know of places online where you can take your pick of several species and multiple vendors. The ones I’ve seen as pets have had extremely poor care, except for the smallest one, who was still small enough to have an OK habitat in a very large aquarium.
In the reptile community, it seems that most people realize how dumb it is to buy an alligator. Unfortunately, it’s just MOST people, definitely not ALL people.
These are the same people who will buy a redtail catfish for their 20 gallon home aquarium. This is a fish that can be over 6 feet long & weigh over 100 pounds as an adult. Um, hello!
I’ve always attributed that to ignorance and sometimes deception (some pet stores will tell you the baby fish are full grown). People really need to do their research before getting animals. Everyone knows alligators get big though!
I live outside of Gainesville, FL. Everything here is Gator this and Gator that. The gators are real and make it a bad idea to let your dog go swimming in the swamps. But the selection of the Gator as a mascot, seems to me, makes about as much sense as selection of the bulldog for a mascot.
But then, football is not about intellect.
You’d be surprised how many people own alligators and how easy they are to obtain. My friend Karen sold dozens of them when she had her pet store in Pikeville, KY (that was before Kentucky revamped its laws regulating exotic pets in the mid-2K00s. You can’t legally own alligators here, now). Unless it’s gone out of business within the last three years or so since I was over that way, there’s a pet store in Logan, WV that still sells caiman, alligators, and other exotic reptiles (the same pet store where I once found an African lion cub for sale).
An alligator about 3 feet long was caught last year in Pond Creek, a Pike County tributary of the Tug River. I’m not surprised and if we keep having relatively warm, open winters, I see no reason why a gator couldn’t survive even over a winter, if it could find shelter in a muddy riverside cave or something.
To some extent, you can control the size of a growing gator by limiting the size of its tank. They grow more slowly when closely confined. But Nature wins out eventually; you can’t keep them small forever. They outgrow their tanks & people “set them free” .Of course the vast majority of them are already unhealthy & die soon. But occasionally they can survive for quite some time. I believe that gators will make it North to, say, Memphis and even central Georgia eventually, as the climate continues to warm and they continue to adapt to it. Especially if the Southeast continues to have the high rainfall of the past few years.
I once wrote my local paper and and asked why they chose to ban the pit-bull spectrum of dogs from advertisement in the classifieds, but alligators were still okay to sell. Their response: “Alligators aren’t illegal.”
Because, you know, just because it’s not illegal it should be okay.
(FWIW you can’t control the size of an animal by putting it in a small tank. You just get a large animal with physical deformities caused by hitting a wall and growing sideways. It’s a horrible thing to see.)
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[…] the meantime, they killed an Alligator in West Virginia, just because they could. Don't you love all the people who call the cops every time they […]
I let the DNR know about this as I see this advertised every so often..
http://tippecanoe.craigslist.org/bar/3920992436.html
The response I got was this. :(
“Thank you for letting us know about this. However, the Indiana DNR does not require a permit to possess an alligator until it reach 5 feet in length, and they are legal to sell until they reach 5 feet in length.”
Um this alligator is 4ft it’ll be 5ft before too long might as well confiscate it now.
Our winters can be harsh so doubt it survives when it really freezes..
I just don’t see the appeal of owning an alligator I love them they’re neat, but rather see them in the wild. Used to see them in the water and banks when canoeing.
[…] Just a few weeks ago, an alligator was killed in Southern West Virginia. […]
They certainly should not have killed that animal
Completely senseless
I was shocked to here the an official would kille that juvenile animal
Such a waste in my opinion
Some effort should’ve been made to relocate the animal
Why was no effort made to relocate the animal
What so waste