this is the text that came with the pics (sent in an e-mail )
The alligator was found ... near a house ,
Game Wardens were forced to shoot the alligator- guess he wouldn't cooperate.
Jayne and Don Hobkirk could hear the bellowing in the night. Their neighbors had been telling them
that they had seen a mammoth alligar in the Lake that runs behind their house, but they dismissed the stories as being exaggerations.
"I didn't believe it," Don Hobkirk said.
Friday they realized the stories were, if anything, understated.
Florida Game and Parks game wardens had to shoot the beast...
Joe Goff, 6' 5" tall, a game warden with the Florida Game and Parks Commission, walks past the 23-foot, one inch alligator that he shot and killed in the back yard of Jayne & Don Hobkirk...
Come on Mike, you've been on these boards much longer than I have been. Maybe your memory is not that of mine; but I've seen this numerous times!
Not to say that the photos are impressive, that gator is not something that I would want to see even if it were in a zoo.
On a side note, I was in New Orleans in '95. My group and I were walking the swamps they have there. We were crossing this bridge and decided to "post up," and there was some people there that were just relaxing. One guy was throwing bread at a gator in the water, RIGHT NEXT TO A SIGN THAT SAID DO NOT FEED GATORS!!! A few times the bread hit the gator, literally, between the eyes. The gator was just eyeballing the guy....I have no idea exactly how big the gator was since I could only see his head and the rest of his body was hidden in the water. I would say it was around 6-7" but purely estimate of course.
I was just waiting for that thing to come out of the water and make a white meat sandwich of the guy...but it didn't happen. Oh, and they were also playing a radio with rock music REALLY loud right next to the water. Which the sign also said not to do!
