Condemned Florida alligators get a reprieve

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The calls came from as far away as Hawaii: Spare Crusty.

The gator, identified in a South Florida Sun-Sentinel story last week, was one of four who hung around rest stops and boat ramps along Alligator Alley in the Everglades. After being fed by humans, they had become overly friendly — and potentially dangerous. Having lost their fear of humans, the law said they had to be destroyed.

But public attention, and an anonymous donor, has led to a permanent stay of execution. Three of the four condemned reptiles embarked Friday on a snappy new life in a shady gator pit at an animal exhibit in the Seminole Reservation in Hollywood, Fla. Crusty is still on the loose.

"They've got it better here than they did out there," said Todd Hardwick, Miami-Dade's noted alligator trapper who helped arrange for the reptiles' new home. "They'll be cared for, get fed. They've got some female gators there."

Crusty's plight came to life in a story about officers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission citing people for feeding the gators at Everglades rest areas. A total of 13 people have been charged this summer with the second-degree misdemeanor. Feeding gators causes them to associate people with food and increases the danger of attack, experts say. This spring, Florida alligators killed three women.

Feeding also means a death sentence for the gators. Crusty and three swampmates, whom wildlife officers named Speedy, Boomer and Freddy, were to be caught and destroyed by Kevin Garvey, Broward County's veteran contract gator trapper.

But Garvey's assignment soon changed.

"Everybody was getting calls," said Hardwick, who fielded a half-dozen himself. "A lot of people felt sorry for the gators." One of Hardwick's callers was a Broward man who wished to remain anonymous. "A total animal lover," was how Hardwick described him. The man offered to pay the costs, $1,150 in this case, of capturing the gators. Trappers are paid not with state funds, but from selling the meat and hides of the animals they catch.

Trappers can sell condemned gators to a licensed animal facility at their own discretion, said wildlife agency spokesman Jorge Pino. Some wildlife officials received calls for a reprieve for the gators, but that didn't affect the agency's position, he added.

"The process worked," Pino said. "An alligator was deemed to be a nuisance and it was removed."