And Intelligence is on Their Side

I guess I'm the meanest son of a bitch who ever lived, for picking on the Texas tourist attraction Gator Country every chance I get. These guys are taking the initiative and trying to bring jobs and needed cash to the Beaumont area, which has been faring poorly since the pharmaceutical companies moved their testing facilities to India, and they could be out robbing liquor stores or stealing their neighbors' tractors, I guess. But damn, you have to see this. Go to their website and click the link that says "Watch Gary handle one of our adolescent gators!"

Are you there? Okay. The first thing I notice is that the video opens with a shot of what appears to be a flooded pasture. Now, let's give Steve Irwin credit, baby-abusing wackjob though he be. His zoo has nice pens with concrete pools for the lizards. Steve has one for himself, in which he and his family relax at the end of the day, while tourists throw them turkey necks and chicken feet. It looks like the guys at Gator Country created their artificial habitat by piling old refrigerators in a drainage ditch until the runoff backed up. This is not how pro gator handlers do it. This is how a guy named Enrique would do it if he built a gator ranch in Hialeah.

Oh God. I probably just gave someone an idea. I apologize in advance to the Animal Control people, who already have their hands full in Hialeah with dogfights and cockfights and people raising Noche Buena pigs in their guest bedrooms. Enrique will stop up a storm drain and put a bunch of poached gators in his yard off of Okeechobee Road, and Animal Control will send that poor goof who twice tried to feed his right hand to the same vicious rottweiler on national TV. I can see it now.

ANIMAL CONTROL GOOF: There's a good gator! Yes, let daddy stroke your snout! [singing] YOU ARE A CHIIIIIIILLLLDDD...OF THE UNIVERSSSSSSE...NO LESS THAN THE TREES AND THE STARRRRRS...YOU HAVE A RIIIIIGHT TO BE HEEERRRE....AAIIIIIEEEEE!!!

ENRIQUE: ¿Senor, que haces?

ANIMAL CONTROL GOOF: [head wedged firmly in the gator's jaws as it whips him back and forth like a rhythmic gymnastics banner] AIIIIEEEE!!!!

ENRIQUE: Que comemierda.

Then, like the rottweiler, the gator will be given expensive taxpayer-funded therapy instead of being dispatched with an axe. And maybe we'll see its reunion with the Animal Control guy.

ANIMAL CONTROL GOOF: Dr. Cugat, I have to say, it was lucky we found an alligator psychotherapist so close to the scene of the attack. By the way, you never did show me your diploma.

ENRIQUE: [disguised by a white coat from his uncle's butcher shop] Si, si. Mañana.

ANIMAL CONTROL GOOF: So what kind of progress have you made with our friend here?

ENRIQUE: Si, mucho progress. Two sousand dollar, please.

ANIMAL CONTROL GOOF: He certainly looks calm [because Enrique and his brother Gerardo force-fed him a tablespoon of Quaaludes before the goof came over]. Let me see how he reacts to me.

ENRIQUE: Two sousand dollar.

ANIMAL CONTROL GOOF: In a minute. Hello, little friend. Let daddy rub your belly! Yessssss, gator loves daddy! [singing] THE FIRST TIIIIME...EVER I SAAAW YOUR FAAACE...I THOUGHT THE SUNNNN...ROSE IN YOUR EYYY-eyyy-EYY-eey-EYY-EYYYYES...AIIEEEEEEE!!!! AIIIEEEEEE!!

ENRIQUE: One sousand dollar?

Anyway, the Gator Country video opens with owner Gary Saurage, who has been identified repeatedly as "Steve" in various news accounts, confronting a gator about seven feet long. Then the action starts, and the camera blatantly cuts to Saurage ruthlessly pounding a gator the size of a cocktail weenie. I mean, it's just sad. The worst special effects since John Kerry's advisors tried to glitz him up for the 2004 Presidential debates by painting him orange.

While the terrified micro-gator yips and dodges and tries to find its way back to the eggshell it just popped out of, Saurage proves his courage by slinging it around the flooded pasture and then bonking it against the rim of a big kidney-shaped plastic basin, which is the Gator Country homologue of a Steve-Irwin-style concrete gator pool.

Is that dignified? My philosophy with gators goes like this. Free them or fry them, but don't humiliate them.

In other gator news, another crabby family has forced the relocation of a large crocodilian. Remember the story I wrote about a few days back, where a family saw a gator and started crabbing to authorities? That was in Florida, where people are rude and everyone crabs constantly. I was surprised today to see that the same thing had happened in Mississippi.

Says the story:

A Sunday afternoon crabbing in a bayou near Griffin Street cemetery, turned exciting for the May family and their neighbors, when a 7-foot alligator made an appearance.

How can you spend a whole afternoon crabbing? Everyone gets cranky now and then, but you get it off your chest and move on.

Here's a good quote: "Duncan May of 5230 North Shore Circle, said despite the inconvenience, he might be glad the alligators have returned to his backyard." The story continues, "By the way, it turns out Duncan won't be getting that full scholarship to MIT this fall."

Duncan is glad the gators are there, because last year they left, and we had hurricanes. He thinks the gators knew they were coming and ran away.

First of all, I would like to know what good it does a gator to crawl a hundred yards at half a mile an hour when a hurricane is coming. If gators were stowing away in Greyhound buses, I would be impressed, but I don't think they did themselves much good just by leaving Duncan's backyard, which was probably not the epicenter of 2005 hurricane activity anyway. I don't recall any forecasters going, "It's Category Three! RUN, DUNCAN!"

Second, in autopsies, alligators routinely give up stomach contents such as mailboxes, beer bottles, old trolling motors, and their own tails. The human race, on the other hand, has weather satellites and giant computers. I know that's not much to go on, but based on those limited facts, who do you think is more likely to know when a hurricane is coming?

Work on it and then call Duncan.

Says Duncan's wife, favored to fill Cambridge's Lucasian Chair of Mathematics when Stephen Hawking retires, "I know this is their (alligators') natural habitat and that we have encroached on them, but I don't want them to hurt my grandbabies."

God, how people have changed. Fifty years ago, she would have been out in the yard herself, shooting gators with a pistol and tacking their hides to dry on the side of her corn crib. She wouldn't even have made Duncan put down his newspaper and come outside. Now she says that on balance, she has reluctantly concluded that it's better to inconvenience a brainless lizard than feed it her grandchildren.

Is this the same "Mississippi" I've heard of in the past? I know sometimes different places have the same name. Maybe there's a town called "Mississippi" near Seattle or San Francisco.

Mississippi's wildlife people are just as bright as the others I've been quoting here in recent weeks. Ryan Rawls, "nuisance alligator trapper" for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks, had some vital input. "Rawls added that alligators are natural inhabitants of the area, and are only a nuisance when they pose a threat to pets or people."

So we now know two things we could not possibly have figured out for ourselves. First, alligators were not dropped in Mississippi by Martians, and second, they are only a problem when they are a problem.

I agree with the story's characterization, "nuisance alligator trapper." If a trapper said something that silly to me, I would turn to whoever was nearby and crab, "That alligator trapper certainly is a nuisance."

More news as it develops. I hear that tomorrow afternoon, Gary Saurage and Steve Irwin plan to turn over a log and tag-team a startled newt.