There’s a zoo about 75 miles down the road that has a lot of alligators. My son loves to go there.
The main alligator tender will tell you that even after YEARS of feeding the alligators, almost all of them would still try to bite him if he gave them the chance. They’re smart enough to know that he’s bringing them food, but they never grow fond of him and have never come to think of him as a friend.
I think a Komodo dragon would make a far better pet. You wouldn’t have to build a pond and you’d never have to worry about burglars again.
Plus you can get really fit playing fun games like this: Komodo Dragon chasing Ayako Imoto on crazy japanese game show - YouTube
Some days I just hate the fact that I live in Florida. And I’m professionally connected with alligators. By coincidence, I just did a radio interview about this – uhh – situation this morning. Short answer, anthropomorphizing this poor animal doesn’t change its innate nature. Tamerlane got it right, way back at Post 5. Gators can be habituated to ignore virtually any stupid human behavior, apparently including playing dress-up. Habituation allows me to carry one into school classrooms for educational display. But I don’t delude myself that my gators enjoy it. They just tolerate it.
I am constantly aware, and strive to impress upon my staff and volunteers, that apparent docility is no guarantee of future safety. These are still wild animals. Any new stimulus, or the X-th repetition of some common stimulus, can trigger a bite. Unpredictability, thy name is alligator. Bites from hatchlings can only do trivial damage to a human adult. A six footer probably can’t kill you except for some highly unlikely confluence of contributing circumstances. But gators that size can produce devastating injury without effort and in the blink of an eye. The woman in the article is deluding herself, doing a disservice to the poor animal, and giving legitimate environmental education a black eye.
I am from the wilds of Louisiana and alligators are not truly dangerous. Attacks on humans are virtually unheard of unless you count non-threatening bites from doing something dumb. I swam in alligator infested waters growing up with little concern.
They are basically the stoners of the Crocodilian group. They are happy to just chill out 99% of the time because, being cold-blooded, they don’t need to eat that often but they do have personality.
I knew an old hermit that had a pet alligator in the pond behind his house. He called her ‘Baby’ but she was anything but that when my father took me over to see her. She was 10 feet long at the time and would come when called. He would yell out ‘Here Baby, Baby Baby!’ and you would see a swish coming from the far corner of the pond and she quickly swam over to him, walked onshore and waited for food. He would pat her on the mouth and tell her what a good girl she was and then give her whole chickens.
When I was in high school, I worked at the supermarket that Skeeter used to get food for her. He would buy whole frozen chickens and tie them onto his side mirrors of his truck for the ride back home so that they would be defrosted when he got back. You always knew it was feeding time when you saw him driving down the road dangling chickens on the side of his truck.
I never witnessed it myself but Skeeter claimed that Baby would heel anywhere he went if called and he would bring her in the house anytime he thought is was too cold outside. It was a true love story between a man and his gator.
See, I just don’t have the notion in my head that an alligator can learn all that, or that they have it in them to behave that way. They’re still reptiles! Does this make me an anti-reptile bigot?
FWIW, I just today watched the scenes with Bilbo and Smaug on YouTube. Now there was one cool (when not breathing fire) reptile. How many alligators can do all that?
Alligators aren’t all that bright but they aren’t very aggressive either and they can be conditioned. If you ever take a swamp tour outside of New Orleans or in the Florida Everglades, you will see wild but conditioned alligators. It is a symbiotic relationship that suits their preferred lifestyle just fine. All they have to do is swim over to the tour boats when they came around, put on a good show and then go back to hanging out the rest of the time. They absolutely love big marshmallows as snacks for some reason but they will leap out of the water for chicken on a pole. It is a good way to make a living for them.
Crocodiles are a different story. They don’t seem to have the same chillin’ and relaxin’ temperament.
Here is what conditioned alligators act like in case you are curious. Marshmallows are known as Swamp Crack to alligators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYdDiT6PiMII doubt alligators are all that smart simply because they got all dem teeth and no toothbrush 
Old thread and banned poster, but for the record, it’s possible to get dinosaurs to talk in English – at least a modest vocabulary:
Note for the dramatically-minded among us the paragraph on artificial intelligence:
That’s right, people are planning to make robot dinosaur brains. Kind of puts “sticking an alligator into a relative’s pond” into perspective on the Darwin Award track.
As long as we leave off the teeth the robot dinosaurs will be totally safe.
Wait a minute, haven’t I seen a movie or twenty where this brilliant plan goes *just slightly *awry?
I am from the civilized bit of Florida and you are completely wrong. Serious attacks happen all the time.
It seems Louisiana alligators are mellow stoners and Florida alligators are amped-up meth-heads. Kinda like their respective rednecks.
An appealing answer! 
But I don’t know if it’s as simple as that. Certainly we have more than our fair share of the crazy here in Flori-duh. My childhood, my chosen college studies, my hobbies, and my vocation have for more than 5 decades put me in close contact with alligators in their native habitats. I don’t have any answers but I have some statistics.
There are approximately 1.25 million wild alligators in FL (cite) and 2 million in Louisiana (cite). These cohabitate with Florida’s 20+ million people (cite) and Louisiana’s 4.6 million (cite).
Since 1948 there have been 337 alligator attacks on humans in Florida, and 2 in Louisiana. (cite)
Now, there are significant differences in the distribution of alligators and people in these two states, due to major differences in the types and extent of surface water (lakes, rivers, swamps, etc.) and how people live around them. And some difference in the origins of the human residents of both states, with FL having perhaps a significantly greater percentage of residents who relocated from somewhere else, and LA being more home-grown. But I don’t know if either or both are sufficient to explain the numbers. Numbers which, quite frankly, surprised me when I searched them out.
Maybe LA folk are smarter in their interactions with ‘gators, or maybe they’re quicker. Or the ‘gators just don’t fool with them Cajuns. But I’m inclined to think perhaps there’s a problem with the reporting system. Or those folks just aren’t admitting getting bitten! 
I’ve spent an awful lot of hours up to my eyeballs in the swamp surrounded by alligators, day and night, in various research studies and other occasions. I’ve never been attacked, even when collecting babies from under momma ‘gator’s nose. But I’d be the last person to suggest that casually ignoring the presence of 8 to 12 feet of powerful, unpredictable, ancient predator is a safe idea.
I think the most likely explanation is simply that Floridians are more likely to live around water. Louisiana is low-lying and flood prone. Florida is also low-lying, but not nearly to the same extent. Florida is a tourist and vacation mecca, which means lots of big houses on the water; Louisiana is a poor backwater.
Yeah, I alluded to exactly that.
Still, 347 to 2 seems unlikely unless we’re talking Florida versus Arizona. I’m inclined to think those 2 just missed the “Don’t tell nobody nuthin’!” memo :D.
I think I figured it out: that Nationmaster graph cites a public health journal article as its source, but notes that “additional figures [are] taken from news reports.” I’m guess Louisiana’s figures are among the latter.
Ahh! So the Louisiana locals did get the memo, but in two instances some carpet bagging Yankee newsmen ratted them out!
Ever hear of the New Orleans area? It is one of the most popular tourism cities in the U.S. and swamp tours just outside the city are a big tourist draw. Even Baton Rouge isn’t a ‘backwater’ and Lafayette is Cajun but it is a real city with plenty of alligators as well. Tons of Louisianans live on or near the water in houses and mansions of all sizes (some of them are even getting electricity soon I hear). It is hard not to live near alligators in south Louisiana or large parts of the rest of the state.
I didn’t mean to imply that alligators are truly safe anywhere but there does seem to be some fundamental difference in human/alligator interaction in Florida versus other populations. Whenever you hear or read about an alligator attack in the U.S., it is almost always Florida and not Louisiana or one of the other states they are found. I never heard of it happening growing up and the local media loved any unusual news from down on the bayou so it would have been broadcast everywhere they could.
The only recent case that I know of was in East Texas not that far from the Louisiana border and it did make the national news. It takes a really ambitious Darwin Award candidate to cause an alligator attack in the area but he found a way by combining several different advanced redneck wild animal taunting techniques.
Man mocks alligators, jumps in water and is killed in Texas
“Although there have been numerous fatal alligator attacks in Florida, the Orange County attack may be the first of its kind in Texas.”
I don’t know why the numbers of attacks are so different between Florida and other areas where they are common. It something that I have always wondered myself but the difference is real based on every statistic I have seen and experience I have had.
Best one line story ever.
Per Tamerlane lizards and crocodiles are not your buddies and they never will be.