Yes…I agree. The child should have known better. But that doesn’t justify the attitude of “I’m not sorry the kid died” .
Maybe I’m wrong but I just don’t see saying that you don’t care that a child died EVEN if he was responsible in a way for his death.
I don’t think we should go out and kill all the gators but I can see where the people in the community are coming from.
I don’t mean any disrespect towards Ratty for his opinion. I was merely pointing out that if you do not have a parent’s heart then I can see where you might not feel the same about this situation and appear more concerned over an animal.
In Conceivable - I remember reading an article about canoeing in some SE swamp, and they said something about not fishing around gators - or in areas where there were a lot of gators, because it would make the gators identify small boats with food. Closest I can come from my grey-matter alone.
gobear - Thank you. Darwin’s elves. I love it. Really has the makings of a username or somesuch.
It says that thanks to modern medical care, a stable healthy food supply, and excellent sanitation that we don’t have to deal with death on a daily basis. Yay us.
I think it might be reasonable to kill gators who come to close to residential areas. They’re not endangered so why not? I have no problems killing vipers who come to close to my house and I have yet to be bitten.
I certainly cannot predict how I would respond to one of them dying young, especially violently. But I can imagine that if they died primarily as a result of their own stupidity, I would be extremely disappointed at their stupidity, and very critical of myself for not having taught them better (whether or not in reality I could have done anything else.)
I truly believe that if I blamed anyone, it would be me and my stupid dead kid. I hope I would not go looking for a scapegoat to blame, whether human, animal, or inanimate.
Wow. Incredibly mis-placed sense of conscience and compassion some of you people are showing here. Watching too much fucking Walt Disney or something?
Why are humans more important than animals? Because they are members of your species, dumbass. Fellow man, and all that. Don’t think so? Just go try living in the wild with all the fuzzy-wuzzy animals, then. Rotsa ruck.
Showing stupidity does not equal deserving death. It’s fucking sociopathic to be so blase about the death of a 12 y.o.
Some of you are showing an awesome level of stupidity right here in this thread, but I’d still try to pull your deluded butts out of the jaws of a gator.
If you were attacked by an alligator, do you really think you would beg people not to kill it?
That is, if you had time to do any begging before it drowned you and then swallowed the dripping chunks of your body. Hey, at least your body would be recycled into the sediment to help feed the ecosystem, right?
If it killed my kid, you’re fucking right I’d kill it out of revenge. No it wouldn’t bring my kid back, but it wouldn’t be getting anyone else’s kid either.
Well I’m all cut up about the alligators, but I’d rather cut the alligators up, if for no better reason than it’s our prerogative as the master race to kill whatever the fuck we feel like, whenever the fuck we feel like it. Darwinism in action, babes. They kill one of ours, we kill ten of theirs and hopefully the threat to ours will have been diminished. Survival of the fittest. Fuck 'em.
Seems reasonable to me.
Then again, I’m not some heartless shrew who seems to view the lives of young children and alligators equivalently. Then again, I’m cursed with the ability to empathise with the drowned child (I also have X-ray vision, and can glow in the dark) so what can you expect?
Being an ignorant Canadian in terms of gator encounters here but isn’t his the equivalent to letting your kids play chicken on the freeway? If your kid dies, blame the drivers! Blame the road for not having enough fences and signs and probably a fucking moat.
No, 12 year olds still need to be supervised (IMO) so where were the parents? Didn’t they bother to ask what the kid was doing (swimming? Swimming where?).
If I was the parents I’d feeling like a fucking failure. They should be blamed for both the kid’s death and the death of 7 gators.
Well, while that kid was stupid for swimming near alligators, I am amazed by how callous people in this thread are being for this kids death. If the gators are a threat, they should be removed from the area - if that means killing them, fine with me. Just be sure to give the alligator meat to the needy, so that we can get some positive use out of the overgrown vermin.
I don’t know about this one. It’s a lot more complicated and grey than black and white. Let’s look at a couple of things:
The boy was swimming with a couple of other, older boys. For all we know they “dared” him into it. They said they were shouting at him that there were gators in the water, but that he wouldn’t come out. Maybe he thought that they were just trying to freak him out, and he didn’t listen. Should he have been in the water: no. Do boys, particularly early adolescents, do dumb crap like this all the time: yes. It’s a wonder as many males survive to childhood as they do.
The gator didn’t eat the boy, but that’s not how gators function. They like to stuff their kill up under a log or something so that the meat gets rotten and tender. Not trying to freak anyone out, it’s just what they do. So it probably would have eaten him, if allowed to do so.
Big gators are a threat, in one way shape or from to humans and their pets. If there are ten foot gators around the lake then woe be to the three year old that just wanders along the banks. Or the poodle or housecat that gets too close. Gators are fast in short bursts, so they can take an animal that wanders close to the waer. (Swimming is just asking for it) Gators are beautiful animals, but they are dangerous. If there are humans living nearby then they should probably be culled (and preferrably eaten) when they get above about 6-7 feet in length.
On some other level, killing the big gators in that lake will lull some (admittedly dim) folks into believing that it’s safe to go swimming there again. If they hadn’t killed the gators then NO ONE sane would go in that water again for a long time. The kids death would keep them out. Now I can almost see the carful of high school kids jumping in for a quick dip on a dare on a drunked up Friday night.
Sad the boy had to die. But kids die for sadder reasons every day. Sad they had to kill the gators, but at least politically I can’t see any other possible response, and it might prevent a future tragedy. Let’s just hope that they don’t exterminate all of the gators in this area.
Sorry, I equate this to parents leaving a loaded gun on a table in their house and then going out (and I’m not against guns, just making a point) shouldn’t the parents be blamed if the kid shoots himself?
Or better: you know your kid can’t swim, leave him alone in the backyard with the pool uncovered?
Reasonable parents, I would like to think, would teach their kids all about pool safety or not to fucking run across the street without looking. Since these people live in Florida, a place known to have gators, a resonable parent should have hammered gator safety into their kids heads.
And yes, I know 12 year olds do whatever they want, which is exactly why 12 year olds need a little supervision. If the kid’s friends were taking care of the kid, I retract my statements though.
I can understand killing the one gator that attacked the child.
But to kill all of them? Just on general principles?
We are talking about a wild animal here, people. An unpredictable animal that acts on instinct. As humans, we bear a responsibility to take care around such animals, since the animals are not smart enough to know that (most of us) mean them no harm.
I’m sorry the child is dead. And I think Shibb’s fourth point is very well taken.