DAILY SENTINEL (Grand Junction, Colorado) 02 October 05 ‘Gator’ Jay hunts alligator, fame in L.A. (Ron Bain)
“Gator” Jay Young, who raises alligators in a San Luis Valley geothermal pool, is back in Los Angeles this weekend, taking a second stab at capturing the now-famous L.A. alligator and interviewing with a Hollywood agent interested in putting him on television.
He was bulldogging gators and wearing alligator-tooth necklaces in the 1970s, long before Paul Hogan made the “Crocodile Dundee” movies. But Young is the real deal, a Colorado cowboy who wrestles alligators for tourist observers almost every day of the summer.
TV news clips of him splashing around in a Los Angeles sewer lagoon, where he got within 10 feet of the overly cautious urban alligator, gave him the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol predicted.
“They’re crazy out there, though,” Young said the day before his flight out of Albuquerque. “It just cracks me up. In the entertainment capitol of the world, they were all so entertained by me running around in a sewer lagoon chasing an alligator.”
Young said his goal this time was to land a post as a host of an educational TV show about reptiles and capture the elusive L.A. gator.
“I wish he would attack me, then I could get my hands on him,” Young said.
A former policeman let the alligator go into a sewer drain at the beginning of the summer because it got too large, Young said.
He wants to go on TV to educate and warn people about the problems associated with owning large reptiles. His family’s farm, Colorado Gators, has tortoises, snapping turtles, rattlesnakes and a monitor lizard that were rescued from distressed pet owners’ homes, Young said.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ but that boa constrictor is going to get big, really big,” Young said, referring to pet owners who don’t do their homework before getting their pet.
The Youngs father Erwin and mother Lynne have just always been into herpetology and ichthyology, or to the layman, raising reptiles and fish.
“I grew up in it. My mom actually had caiman as pets when I was very young, and I always had snakes and salamanders and things like that,” Gator Jay said. Caiman are a type of South American crocodile, not as big as alligators, but fast and aggressive, he said. “I was 5 the first time I got a good bite.”
Jay still has all 10 fingers and toes, but that’s not for lack of effort by a couple of gators between six and 10 feet long. He said he came close to losing the thumb from his left hand and three fingers from his right hand, but he knew not to pull away.
“They were clamped down and trying to pull it off. If I had pulled away, I would have lost it,” he said. “There is no room for fear in this business. A lot of that comes with experience and keeping your cool when you get bit.”
Erwin Young “a pioneer in integrated farming, holistic resource management, using and reusing,” his son says — started raising alligators as “garbage disposals for the fish farm. Alligators are cold-blooded animals. You can feed ’em all the rotten fish you want.”
Founded in Texas in 1962, what is now Colorado Gators moved to the Alamosa area in 1977, but it was originally a catfish and trout farm, with another type of fish, tilapia, as feed stock for the other fish. Now, the worldwide demand is for tilapia, a perch-like African fish with white, flaky meat, Jay said.
After the fish are fileted, the carcasses are fed to the alligators, which were transported from Florida in 1987 as an experiment that began with 100 baby alligators, Jay said.
Those gators are more than 18 years old now, and some measure 12 feet long and weigh 600 pounds, Jay said.
“People wanted to see ’em,” Jay said. “We started getting basically into agro-tourism. We get about 35,000 visitors each year.”
Colorado Gators is more than alligator wrestling for tourists, though. They’re doing groundbreaking research, Jay said.
“We have successfully hatched over 300 over seven years,” he said. “Nobody’s ever hatched them in this kind of climate or altitude.”
Colorado Gators ships unprocessed alligator carcasses back to Florida, where they’re in demand for the traditional alligator bags and boots but also for the meat, according to Jay.
“It’s a high-dollar item down South, a very good meat,” he said. “We got a call from a restaurant in Grand Junction just the other day that serves alligator. Because of the hurricane, they’re having problems getting gator meat from their supplier in Louisiana, and so they called us. But we don’t process any gators here.”
The alligators are growing so well in their ideal 87-degree Fahrenheit swamp in the San Luis Valley that Jay expects to set world records for biggest captive-bred alligator, if he lives long enough.
“These guys could end up being some world-record monsters. They’ll live 60 to 90 years, and they grow the whole time ... if we can keep them from killing each other,” he said. “In the wild, a 600-pound alligator is probably 40 or 50 years old.
“Even when it’s 30 below outside, the alligators still live in a nice warm pool. They’re warmer here than the ones in Florida. They grow faster as a result because that makes their metabolism faster.”
Jay hopes to be counting more than his fingers and toes when he returns from Los Angeles; he’s hoping for a big fat check from a producer of syndicated TV shows in Hollywood “that’ll keep the farm going.”
‘Gator’ Jay hunts alligator, fame in L.A.