COLUMBUS DISPATCH (Ohio) 23 July 08 Athens police snap up toothy suspect - 27-inch gator found in neighborhood (Josh Jarman)
Catching him was easy. The trick was getting him to stand still for a booking photo.
Athens police picked up a 27-inch alligator on Mill Street about 4:30 a.m. today. The reptile was caught, photographed and then turned over to Hocking College's Hocking Woods Nature Center.
Dave Sagan, the center's director, said waking up at 5a.m. for an alligator call is not as unusual as he would like.
“About once every two years, we get one dropped off or get a call for one,” he said.
Two years ago, it was for an alligator left behind by an evicted couple in nearby Glouster. The house was spotless except for the alligator in the kitchen, he said.
Sagan has a reputation with local law enforcement as the go-to guy for any problem with strange or exotic animals. It's a situation that arises more often than not, he said, because of people's fickle pet-buying habits.
“When people look at a baby alligator they go ‘awwwww,'” Sagan said. “They're very cute. But they quickly outgrow any domestic setting.”
This little guy probably was abandoned by an Ohio University student who was moving out of the area, Sagan said. He was found in a neighborhood at the edge of campus, most likely trying to make his way to the Hocking River.
Sagan and the students on his staff named the alligator Fish, after Athens Police Lt. Anthony Fish, who found him. Best-case scenario, Sagan said, is that he can find someone heading to Florida who can take the alligator to a facility that releases alligators less than 5 feet long back into the wild.
Had the alligator been larger than 5 feet, Sagan said, it would have been jerky time. He knows a number of local chefs and meat processors who told him to call should he come across an alligator he couldn't deal with.
And he wouldn't hesitate, he said, because if a larger alligator got shipped off to Florida, that would be its fate anyway.
For now, Fish will live in a large plastic tub at the center until Sagan can make arrangements to get him back to the Florida swamps where he belongs.
“These animals need to stay in the wild, on farms or in zoos,” he said. “There are just not a practical pet.”
Athens police snap up toothy suspect