We wrap our jaws around Florida's state reptile
When I was a kid growing up on the brim of the Big Cypress, there was no such thing as a "nuisance alligator." There were only alligators. And if one happened to come up in your yard and snatch your dog or cat—my mom lost more than one kitten to the beast that made its bed on the bank of the canal behind our house—you accepted it. You didn't call a trapper, and you certainly didn't call Channel 7 or some other hysterical news operation. Gators ate small animals, and occasionally one of those small animals belonged to you. That's what you got when you lived near a swamp.
Here's what you also got: the opportunity to eat those gators right back. And when I was a kid, someone always was offering my dad meat from a freshly killed alligator. (When Pop hunted, it was for deer or quail; he left the gator-slaying to others.) Second to venison, gator became my favorite game meat, and the only way we ever ate it was pan-fried, often with gravy and usually with greens and potatoes. We didn't bathe it in a whole-grain mustard sauce and we certainly didn't mold it into the shape of a crab cake and top it with a sweet melon salsa. Had Pop ever done up gator that way, he likely would have been guided to the gate of his hunting camp and asked to never come back. (He may have suffered a worse fate should he have gone all Food Network in the presence of Crazy Nick, the camp member whose Vietnam flashbacks often resulted in him blasting the trees behind his cabin with machine-gun fire. But that's a story for another article.)
