BRADENTON HERALD (Florida) 18 September 03 Later gator: Reptile at store caught (Abby Weingarten)
East Manatee: History may document Wednesday as the day they drove old Dixie down.
Dixie the 8-foot, 300-pound alligator, that is.
The toothy reptile lived in a retention pond behind Winn-Dixie on State Road 64 East for three or four years, employees said, until 2 p.m. Wednesday when Bradenton police summoned a trapper to ship her away.
Dixie, as workers named her after the grocery store, was usually harmless, sunning by the fence behind the plaza alleyway to the delight of gawking cashiers. Once, two years ago, she chased some workers while they were taking out the garbage, but the bunch dodged her, laughed and shook it off.
Last Thursday, however, co-manager Mike Davis didn't find it so funny when Dixie slinked under the chain links, shuffled her scaly heels, and, mouth gaping, began to charge at him while he was hoisting trash bags into the Dumpster.
Dixie has been modeling her jaws in the street on a regular basis lately, Davis said, probably because someone has been feeding her.
"She would have been fine if she had stayed in the water," Davis said. "But it could have been a matter of time before she chased someone else."
Before Davis could file a complaint Wednesday, a nearby restaurant employee saw Dixie meandering into the road and called Bradenton police, who happened to be patrolling outside the building.
Police phoned a licensed animal trapper from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said Bradenton Police Lt. Sam Campbell. The trapper lassoed her, taped her snout and, with the help of officers, lifted her into a cage in his truck, Davis said.
"She was big enough to take down a cow," said Maryellen Janney, a photo lab technician who witnessed the trapping. "I've been watching her for three or four years through the fence."
After trappers find and remove an alligator of Dixie's size, they destroy the animal, ship the meat to a processing plant and tan and sell the hides. This is their method of earning money, according to Linda Edwards, duty officer at the commission.
The organization services 12 counties and has eight state-licensed trappers - private contractors who drive their own vehicles, pay for their own gas and only make money when they capture cargo, she said.
There are up to 1.5 million alligators in Florida, which, according to commission spokesman Gary Morse, is all the state can support. Relocation as opposed to trapping is "generally a bad idea," he said. Because the water is still warm, alligators have been fairly active, Morse said. By fall, the activity should taper off until mating season starts at the end of March.
"Most of the time, it's people's fault that an alligator is destroyed," Morse said. "They have inappropriate interactions with alligators like feeding them, which is illegal. Basically, they are assigning the death mark to that animal when they alter its behavior that way."
Later gator: Reptile at store caught