How did a big, healthy six-foot-long gator end up near the front doorsteps of a Dallas middle school?
Thousands of Dallas kids are counting down the hours, desperate to get ‘out’ of school for summer break.
But this one wild gator, it seems, was desperate to get ‘in’.
Alligator experts say it’s very rare for a big gator like that to be wandering the fields of Dallas County.
Gators tend to stick to southeast Texas because of the climate.
But some alligators do live in North Texas, calling the Trinity River home.
Dallas ISD says the creature is clearly not a student at Hulcy Middle School.
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But beyond that, little is known about how it ended up in far southern Dallas.
“Every once in a while, they’ll make it into the Trinity River and up into some of the lakes around here. It is pretty rare,” said Bradley Lawrence, the Reptile Supervisor at the Dallas Zoo.
Lawrence doesn’t think the gator was someone’s pet.
“It would be rare for someone to keep it as a pet for that long, usually a gator would be abandoned as a pet much earlier,” he said. “I think it’s likely it’s just one of the local resident alligators wandering around, looking for a new place to hang out.”
The alligator was not hurt when the Texas Game Warden and Dallas Animal Control officer wrangled him into their truck.
The gator trappers drove miles away, safely releasing the creature into the Trinity River.
Lawrence says the alligator would have likely avoided contact with humans as much as possible, and wouldn’t seek out a person to attack and bite.
“Wild alligators are very shy animals. Even the big ones. They’ll tend to take off, they don’t want to be anywhere around humans. The problem alligators though are the ones that people feed. If you feed a wild animal and it starts to get used to humans, and begin to associate humans with getting food, that’s when it becomes a problem,” he said.
