true. i also fail to see how any intelligent fourteen year old would acutally go near an aligator.
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you'd be surprised...
Seriously though, it sounds like it's backwoods country, kind of. In the sticks like that, kids are always encountering stuff like rattlesnakes (which are a LOT more dangerous than gators), hogs (ditto), etc... a gator's really not that dangerous on land. It can snap and all that, but if you can come up behind it, you can grab it by the neck and hold its mouth shut with your hands. Gators have fairly odd jaw muscles; they can snap shut like you wouldn't believe (very powerful bite), but you could hold their jaws shut with one hand. In fact, you could use some string, and that'd be all you need...
Me, I actually went fishing for gators once. True story-- my uncle took me and my older brother out once, when i was 14, and we cast a big spinner-- flashy, plenty of colors-- near gators, and those that grabbed it, we'd pull in near, take the hook out, and release it. Fun stuff! Didn't hurt 'em either-- worst that could've happened would have been that the hook might've stuck into their jaw, and my uncle would've known how to remove it then (wire cutter and pliers). We only got two-- a six-footer and a four-footer-- but it was still fun...
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It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.