Hunting Dinosaurs

[texasjohn]

I think he should skin and mount the largest... then place it in a visible place with a sign:

"Warning, watch 'gator on duty!"

Might be a good deterrent. If you want to risk the dinosaur, you still have to deal with the fellow who brought him in!

[Sigarms]

I love the quote per the article posted

Vliet's advice: Take advantage of your intelligence, people.

I ate gator once and really liked it, not to many up here in the north country. Quess I'll have to stick with venison

Honestly, I kind of like it that way

Although I hear some golfers in South Carolina have had their encounters with this creature.

How is he hunting them?

I'm more curious as to where the kill shots on the animal is taken?

[SkyPup]

The only way to kill a gator is to sever his spinal cord at the base of his brain or destroy his brain. You could shoot him 100 times in the body with a 30:06 and would not slow him down one bit, it is a reptile, kinda like a frog, you can cut him in two and the front half will crawl off.

The ONLY way to permanently kill him is to take a bang stick (12 gauge, .44 Mag) and fire it off in contact with his skull directly over his brain or at the base of his skull on his spinal cord. The central nervous system has to be completely destroyed before he will stop moving and breathing, anything else is just an irritation to the beast.

[dmccarty]

The brain on a gator is supposed to be the size of a walnut/golf ball. Not a larger target area.

The state needs to allow more gator hunting. Way too many of them in FLA these days. They really have come back too strongly from extinction. I just got back from a vacation in FLA and I think it was the Orlando paper that had a story saying that gator skin and meat is very cheap these days. The gator farmers are not buying/harvesting gator eggs because there is no demand for the product.

I know of places out in the Water Management Districts aka the Everglades that during the daytime you won't see a gator. If you are in the same place at night and shine a flashlight at the water hundreds of eye pairs will be looking back at you! Those eyes aint from mermaids! You might survive five minutes in the water. Maybe.

Later,
Dan

[two_bit_score]

Originally Posted by dmccarty

The brain on a gator is supposed to be the size of a walnut/golf ball. Not a larger target area.

The state needs to allow more gator hunting. Way too many of them in FLA these days. They really have come back too strongly from extinction. I just got back from a vacation in FLA and I think it was the Orlando paper that had a story saying that gator skin and meat is very cheap these days. The gator farmers are not buying/harvesting gator eggs because there is no demand for the product.

I know of places out in the Water Management Districts aka the Everglades that during the daytime you won't see a gator. If you are in the same place at night and shine a flashlight at the water hundreds of eye pairs will be looking back at you! Those eyes aint from mermaids! You might survive five minutes in the water. Maybe.

Later,
Dan

Yep. Saw an article recently that said the La. gator farmers business was down to lamost nothing due to the economy. Not too much call for 'gator shoes, boots and purses when you ain't got no money.

[RockyMtn.Hillbilly]

If I found a good reputable source for gator meat, I'd order some!
Being in Colorado sucks at times.

[EddieWalker]

We have them around here, but I've never seen one. The Sabine River is the country line, and about 4 miles North of my place. There are sancturaries for them along the river where they are protected, but I don't know if there are hunts for them, or why they are being protected. My property line is a creek that feeds to another creek that goes into the Sabine. We sort of figure it's just a matter of time until an aligator works it's way up the creeks and finds our pond. How the beavers and turtles know there is a pond on the other side of the dam while in the creek is a mystery, but if they figured it out, I'm guessing that an aligator will. There are places that I've been told that they are out in the open and easy to see, but so far, we haven't gone looking for them. I'd like to see them and take some pictures, but Steph doesn't want to. What really suprises me is that they are this far North. We get snow and temps into the teens. When it does snow, it rarely sticks, and that's once every couple of years. Mostly it just melts when it hits the ground. But temps in the teens are very common in winter. I never thought they could handle the cold like that, but they obviously can.

Nice pictures. I'd like to hunt them one of these days. I don't know what I'd do with it, so that's sort of been why I've never really done anything about it, but it does seem kind of interesting.

Thanks for sharing,
Eddie

[WalterDonovan]

Yikes!

[Sigarms]

You could shoot him 100 times in the body with a 30:06 and would not slow him down one bit, it is a reptile, kinda like a frog, you can cut him in two and the front half will crawl off.

The first thing that came to my mind was the Japs had it all wrong with Godzilla