Posted on 05/22/2024 5:25:54 AM PDT by Red Badger
Taking away his best friend was a cold-blooded thing to do.
An upstate New York man who kept a 750-pound pet alligator in his house is an emotional wreck after government agents hauled his pal away – and he sees the same heartbreak in Albert’s scaly face.
“I know his look, and that happy face that you see is not there no more,” an emotional and sleepless Tony Cavallaro told The Post. “He looks very lost and very distraught.
Cavallaro raised Albert since he was a hatchling 34 years ago, an elaborate pen in his home to house the gator.
“I see the look in his face,” Cavallaro said about the blind, 34-year-old alligator that was shipped to a new home in Texas this month. “Reptiles express a lot, they have as much expression as humans, you just don’t see it a lot because there’s scales.”
In March, Albert was taken from Cavallaro’s home in Hamburg, outside of Buffalo – where he kept him in an elaborate pen that cost more than $120,000 to install. The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided the abode after an anonymous allegation that Cavallaro had allowed people to swim with the reptile, as officials said Albert had been kept without a permit since 2021.
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uktxaBpFB9k
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
A minor hurricane blew through the area north of Naples in Southwest Florida. A young single man with a love of nature lived on some acreage in a traditional wood frame house on stilts close to the Estero River. The hurricane winds and tidal surge did not damage his house, but it did leave a small alligator dazed and near dead in the yard, hooked and tangled up in fishing line.
Taking pity, Florida Man removed the hook and line and put the alligator in a large steel tub with some water and bait minnows. Florida Man then went off to work. On his return, he was satisfied to see that the alligator had revived and eaten the minnows.
Over the course of several years, the alligator outgrew the tub and minnows diet and was then put in a fenced enclosure with a pond. The gator thrived on a diet of raw chicken parts every afternoon.
Florida Man realized of course that the gator needed to be back in the wild, so he took it out of the enclosure and put it in the river -- only to have the gator still turn up every afternoon insisting on chicken dinner before he would return to the river.
The ordinary course of such a story would have Florida Man coming to grief because of feeding a wild alligator. This was not to be in that Florida Man died in a traffic accident. And for years afterwards, canoeists on the Estero River had to beware of a large alligator that would bump into canoes expecting a sandwich or other food.
Looks like a pretty nice "tightly confined" pen to me. Living there 34 year and fed daily, I'm sure Albert had no complaints. Wild alligators should have it so good....
Yeah, I just checked out the picture. It’s still not optimal for a gator. He is a cutie, though.
Considering the gator is blind, I’m not so sure it was such a good idea to take it away at this stage of his life.
You voted for this.
In my younger days many years ago, I caught and handled baby alligators in the wild several times as part of a wildlife survey as they began to come back from near extinction. Baby alligators are remarkable in their coloration and perfect, almost jewel-like form. It is easy to see why people would want them as pets when they are small. Adult alligators in the wild are usually scarred up, with algae growing on them and an air of menace in that they are instinctively eyeing you as a potential meal.
Yes, Albert the alligator, was heartbroken that his future plans for making a meal of his human pal were stopped by animal control.
Gotta love government. Always there to protect ourselves from ourselves.
It is like reading a story where a family rescues a deer only to have the government show up, kill the deer, to protect the deer.
Mother and baby:
How many to make a belt? Almost kidding...
WORSE-—the alligator is BLIND???
Bring Albert home 🐊
Our survey consisted of going from road to road estimating the population of large gators from eye shine and grabbing a few dispersed babies and yearlings for closer examination and measurement. With hunting banned for some years, the gators were thriving.
After an early phase when mothers protect alligator hatchlings, the babies scatter lest they be eaten by her or other alligators. As the biologist explained, the surviving babies and yearlings would continue to disperse from the colony of adult alligators before settling into new territories and eventually reproducing as adults.
In effect, I got to see the rebound of Florida's alligator population in its earliest phase. Now the state is rife with them -- although not quite like in the days of the first European explorers. William Bartram’s Man-Eating Monster
Lizards don’t have emotions. This guy is like a woman who thing nature is a Disney movie.
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