A Florida gator hunter scared himself when he caught the second largest of its kind in the Sunshine State, measuring more than 4 feet in length and weighing 920 pounds, which he compares to a dinosaur.
Kevin Brotz, who runs an organization called Florida Gator Hunting and has been at it for nearly two decades, was out on the water with two others near Orlando on Friday.
The gator — whose population the state of Florida is trying to control — appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and its size caused visible shock to the men on board.
“When we saw this gator, it was much bigger than anything we’ve ever caught before,” he said.
“It was a giant dinosaur,” Brotz added. “It’s not every day you get a giant dinosaur in your boat.”
Kevin Brotz (top right of photo), a Florida alligator hunter, scared himself when he caught the second largest of its kind in the Sunshine State, at over 13 feet long and 920 pounds, which he compares to a dinosaur
It took Brotz and his fellow paddlers, Darren Field and Carson Gore, four hours to restrain the gator, which eventually weighed 920 pounds and 13 and three and three quarter inches.
“I lay down in the front of the boat and said, ‘Okay, I have to lie down until we get back,’ because I thought I was going to die. That thing was huge,” Gore said.
“I had anxiety like I’d never felt before,” Brotz added.
Brotz noted that he has been tracking alligators for a long time and has even made it his job, but this was something new.
“I’ve lived here all my life and I think about alligators, but I’ve never really experienced this,” he said.
He also worried about the safety of Field and Gore, who are close friends.
“Honestly, my first concern was safety because we were in a smaller boat,” Brotz said.
“And then you add an alligator whose head is so big. All he has to do is turn around and we’re in trouble. So all we kept saying, all I kept saying was, ‘Guys, we have to be smart. We have to play it safe.’ And I couldn’t have been with better people.’
Kevin Brotz, who runs an organization called Florida Gator Hunting and has been doing it for nearly two decades, was out on the water with two others near Orlando on Friday
The gator — whose population the state of Florida is trying to control — appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and its size caused visible shock to the men on board.
“It was a giant dinosaur,” Brotz said. ‘It’s not every day you get a giant dinosaur in your boat’
According to the state wildlife commission, this gator was only the second in Florida history after one to weigh more than 1,000 pounds.
The largest alligator on record is a 1,011-pound giant found in Alabama in 2014, according to the New York Post.
Brotz doesn’t want people to know the exact location where they caught the gator, fearing that more people will visit and interact with the gator themselves.
“Ultimately, if a beast that size gets a hold of you, or, God forbid, a child, the odds are tough,” he said. WESH.
He also expressed his ambivalence towards the need to kill the alligator, which was done to control the local population.
Brotz and his fellow paddlers, Darren Field and Carson Gore, took four hours to restrain the gator, which eventually weighed in at 920 pounds and 13 and three and three quarter inches.
According to the state wildlife commission, this gator was only the second in Florida history, after one to weigh more than 1,000 pounds.
Brotz noted that he has been tracking alligators for a long time and has even made it his job, but this was something new
“I never feel good about killing an animal. But having said that, I respect the harvest,” he said. “Tags are assigned to keep the population out of control.”
He also referred to an alligator that killed a 2-year-old boy at Disney World in 2016.
These are killing machines. They can, not that they want to, but it happens. So we also have to balance the population, so that’s how we look at it.’