You can be taught loads about an animal from what it eats. Usually, which means poking a pile of scat with a stick. But for one South Carolina alligator hunter, the stuff that didn’t move by way of a 12-foot gator was rather more attention-grabbing.
Ned McNeely introduced the 445-pound gator to Kenneth Cordray’s butcher store in Ravenel, South Carolina, after taking it on his property in Adam’s Run in April 2021, WCSC reported. (Killing nuisance gators on personal property is authorized year-round in South Carolina.) McNeely reportedly requested Cordray about trying by way of the gator’s abdomen contents. Cordray finally obliged, and the outcomes had been gobsmacking.
The investigation yielded 5 looking canine collar tags, a number of bobcat claws and turtle shells, a bullet casing, and a spark plug, Cordray wrote in a Facebook submit. (No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.)
One of the canine tags nonetheless had a legible cellphone quantity printed on it, so Cordray gave it a name. An older man answered the cellphone.
“He said that he had a lease down on the other side of the river from where the gator was killed, 24 years ago,” Cordray advised WCSC. “And they always figured [that] the dogs got eaten by the gators.”
Cordray referred to the canines as “hunting dogs” all through the report and “deer dogs” within the Facebook submit. He estimated they weighed round 80 kilos. If the canines’ proprietor appropriately recalled when he had that lease, that meant the gator was properly over 25 years outdated.
“I had to shoot it a couple of times, and I had to get a bunch of ropes and hooks and kayaks and a tractor with a chain to finally get it out of the canal,” McNeely mentioned.
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The Facebook submit is resurfacing on social media though the hunt occurred two years in the past. Plenty of on-line commenters have weighed in. One commenter wrote that the South Carolina gator might assist with Florida’s python downside, whereas one other talked about the way it belongs in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Yet one other commenter left a very optimistic quip: “Glad they didn’t find any wedding bands!”