A 1,000 pound alligator in a gated community in swanky Hilton Head, SC held Diana and Arthur Andrews hostage in their home for over five hours a few days ago. It all started around 5:30 AM last Saturday when Diana got up early to take her Scottish terrier for a walk and opened the door to find the 12-foot-long reptile waiting on her porch.
Uh oh. According to what Arthur told ABC News , she yanked the dog by the tail to pull it inside to safety.
Then they called the security guard who was probably operating a little bit above his pay grade when he tried to frighten the enormous grandfather of all gators back into the lagoon behind their home. Anyway, it didn’t work.
Apparently, 1,000 pound alligators don’t scare as easily as you might think.
They ended up calling a service called Critter Management . It took a team of seven men to tape and lasso the feisty animal before they could remove it.
Diana told a local news station that they’d never had an alligator come knocking at their door before, and I believe her. Heck, it isn’t the kind of thing you’d easily forget.
However, there seems to be a better-than-average risk of running into overweight gators in the Hilton Head area. Last year, a group of children reported a 13-footer, also believed to weigh about 1,000 pounds, from a lake in a city park on Hilton Head Island.
It grabbed a kid’s soccer ball on a Saturday but wasn’t successfully removed by Critter Management until the following Monday evening.
To catch that bad boy, they had to put bait on a hook and go out on a boat, which the gator actually pulled around the pond for an hour until it got tired enough to be manageable.
From the sound of it, they’re knee-deep in over-sized lawn lizards in Hilton Head. Both of these 1,000 pound alligators were harvested.
[giant alligator photo by Elaine Radford]
