No, I’m not turning WLT Report into Noah’s Daily Reptile Report….although I am absolutely fascinated by alligators!
And by “fascinated” I mean “terrified”.
Florida people, I really don’t know how you do it with this prehistoric beasts just roaming around all over, likely in every body of water or brush anywhere you go.
I couldn’t do it.
But I DO love watching them online from the safety of my non-alligator infested home!
Why am I even talking about any of this in the first place?
Because yesterday we brought you this report:
MUST SEE: Massive Alligator Caught On Video At South Carolina Golf Course
And in the comments to that report, "momforfreedom" told me I had to check out the Reptile Gardens in the Black Hills of South Dakota:
So I did.
Huge shout out to all my friends in South Dakota!
I checked out the Reptile Gardens and holy crap these people are crazy!
momforfreedom was not joking, this is truly wild stuff.
Why in the world you would ever choose to do this for a living I have no idea, but check out these clips from the Reptile Gardens.
I've cued them up to the right spots (hopefully) but I'll put the time-stamps so you can find them if they don't start in the right spots.
At the 10:05 minute mark, check out this kid pulling snake after snake out of these locked up metal boxes and then holding them like it's nothing at all.
You could not pay me enough money but major props to this kid for showing no fear and being entertaining the whole way through:
But that was really just a warm up.
As if playing with deadly snakes wasn't good enough, this kid then climbed into an alligator and caiman infested enclosure and starts messing with them!
Riding them like a horse....
Tapping their noses....
Dragging them by the tails....
And then bringing a huge bucket of food into the pit and throwing it around to chum up the waters!
Of course he does it all with a smile and he's wildly entertaining!
Starting at 29:22 watch here:
Major respect but I fear for this kid's safety!
According to local Aberdeen news, there have been prior incidents:
An employee at Reptile Gardens was bitten Saturday by an alligator he handles during shows at the tourist attraction in western South Dakota's Black Hills.
The man was a performer who works with the alligator during one of the three daily shows put on by Reptile Gardens. He was taken to a Rapid City hospital for treatment.
"He got bit; it's nothing serious," Reptile Gardens assistant manager Clint Hubbeling told the Rapid City Journal. "It was just a little thing that happened. Everybody freaked out at first, but it's not a big deal."
Hubbeling couldn't say if the employee lost any fingers, but he compared the injury to a cat scratch.
"It's like when you play with a cat, you're gonna get scratched," Hubbeling said.
And from SDPG, here's more:
The cafe is where Plank, a 30-year-old graduate of Rapid City Stevens High School, started working for the Reptile Gardens as a teenager. The summer he graduated from high school, they were short on snake-and-gator show performers, so he tried that and liked it. He came back to work summers while studying conservation/biology at Arizona State University.
His seasonal work eventually began full time, and he’s now the assistant curator of reptiles. Along with reptile care and oversight, he is a trainer for the snake and gator shows and typically only steps into the pens in front of crowds when colleges kids have taken off for the semester and performers are needed.
Along the way, he distinguished himself in many ways, including sustaining the most alligator bites — five — of any gator wrestler. Four of those were pretty common in gator wrestling, where part of the show involves pulling a gator out of the water by the tail and slipping onto its back, with knees behind both of the reptiles front legs.
It also means grabbing the gator’s snout with both hands, opening it — and having it snap shut, which leaves room for some minor hand bites.
In one, Plank admits he was distracted by “cute girls in the crowd.”
Being distracted and wrestling is a bad combination. And since most gator wrestlers are young men, it’s not an unfamiliar one.
Even so, Plan says proudly, “we’ve never had anybody lose a finger or anything.”
One of his five gator bites was different, and the incident was the most threatening to Plank. As he went to slide up on the gator’s back, the reptile thrashed sideways and threw him off, catching Plank’s arm with its teeth as its swept its head sideways.
As the crowd screamed, Plank scooted backwards quickly away from the gator, but he was bleeding badly. The gash at the base of his left bicep took 17 stitches to close, plus a few stitches on a smaller wound.
It left more than the physical scar.
“That one hit me a little differently than the others,” Plank said.
He still enjoys the gator shows, but always remembers their potential. There are no mixed feelings about the snakes shows, however. Plank has never been bitten, And he has always been particularly intrigued by snakes.
Like the gator shows, which have been altered to make them safer for performers and less likely to offend some reptile lovers who might consider some things to be mishandling of the gators, snake shows are more carefully done these days.
There was a time when they were a little more daring, and not always in a good way.
Marshall Young experienced the old ways in the old days. The 80-year-old retired judge from Rapid City started working at the Reptile Gardens when he was about 12 years old.
“I was putting on bumper stickers out in the parking lot,” he said. “I made a dollar a day back then, which was awfully good money at a time when movies were only about a nickel.”
Young said he “graduated on to gardening, but I was saving the weeds and killing the flowers. So I next became a guide in the snake pits. And I worked all the way through college.”
Riskier behavior then was more likely to produce snake bites. And Young was bitten once by a prairie rattlesnake and once by a water moccasin. He didn’t go to the hospital for either bite.
“Back then we just treated it,” he said. “With the rattlesnake bite, we used the old cut-and-suck method, which you’re not supposed to use anymore. My hand swelled up to the size of a football. But it wasn’t really all that painful. I was back to work in a couple of days.”
His physical reaction to the water moccasin bite wasn’t quite as severe.
“Back then with the water moccasin they said freeze the bite, and put a tourniquet on it instead of cutting and sucking.”
Young said he did end up with an impaired finger because of damage from the venom.
And gators?
“I never had a problem gator wrestling,” he said. “But I was a lot more careful with those critters.”
In case you missed it, here was our report from yesterday:
MUST SEE: Massive Alligator Caught On Video At South Carolina Golf Course
A massive alligator was caught on video on the grounds of a South Carolina golf course.
The video was caught by a user on X who spotted the massive gator at the Kiawah Ocean Course on Kiawah Island in South Carolina.
Take a look:
Insane crocodile at the Kiawah Ocean Course! Props to the cameraman for getting close.
For a $600 green fee, you not only get to shoot a 103, but you get to meet this specimen!
My buddy sent me this. They literally walked right by him and then he crossed over the tee box… pic.twitter.com/YDaCAcQ63k
— Rick Golfs (@Top100Rick) April 2, 2025
Good Luck Teeing Off With This Dinosaur Walking Around Kiawah's Ocean Course Right In Front Of Your Facehttps://t.co/kHVRqcH0Ww pic.twitter.com/XvAOG1bY3e
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) April 3, 2025
Per OutKick:
An incredible video of an alligator on a stroll is making the rounds online.
You never know what you're going to get with the animal thunderdome. It can be a house of horrors or it can be pretty cool.
Massive buck? That's awesome. A massive alligator that could tear you limb-to-limb? Not so much, and that's what brings us here today.
The X account @Top100Rick shared some awesome footage of a giant alligator walking around Kiawah Ocean Course on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and the video is a must-watch.
The alligator didn't have a single fear in the world, which is par for the course (no pun intended).
#LOOK — This gigantic gator is patrolling the Kiawah Ocean Course!
(Via: @Top100Rick) pic.twitter.com/nKxEGbaBlU
— NUCLR GOLF (@NUCLRGOLF) April 2, 2025
RELATED REPORT:
Alligator Trainer Jumps Into Tank…To Save Her Own Life!
Alligator Trainer Jumps Into Tank...To Save Her Own Life!
I have to admit something...
Hi, I'm Noah and I have an addiction to alligator stories.
(Hi Noah!)
It's kind of a sick, strange obsession.
I just find them fascinating and terrifying all at the same time.
Like a car wreck where you don't want to look....but you also can't look away.
That's me with Alligators.
And Alligators live in Florida, and so while I love all my MAGA buddies living in Florida, I am also fascinated with people in Florida.
How do you people live with these giant reptiles walking around all over the place?
It's terrifying!
Like this....
Have you seen this?
This thing looks like something out of Jurassic Park and it's just strolling down a Florida street, no big deal:
You people live with this stuff?
Of course, the worst one was something that happened a few weeks ago...
MAJOR WARNING BEFORE CONTINUING: readers may find this very distressing.
This is a tragic and horrific story.
I love the FREEDOM of Florida, but I'm not sure I would want to live there.
I'm both fascinated and terrified of all the alligators living in that state.
Every pool of water, no matter how small or shallow it may look, is very likely to house an alligator.
How do you people live around these things?
Its terrifying!
Sadly, one woman paid the ultimate price walking her small dog right along the shoreline.
Why???
Ugh, it just makes me sick.
This poor 85-year old woman taking her small dog out for a walk never suspecting it would be her final day.
And what a tragic and horrifying way to go.
I feel so bad for her and her family.
It was all captured on video:
Video captured the moment a Senior Citizen, 85 year old Gloria Serge was trying to protect her dog. She ended up being attacked herself by an alligator and killed near her home in Florida. #AlligatorAttackVideo pic.twitter.com/7vDyDNWvxE
— Dominic Carter (@DominicTV) February 23, 2023
From Fox News, the alligator is said to have weighed 600 to 700 pounds!
A video has emerged showing the moments before a 85-year-old Florida woman was fatally attacked by an alligator while walking her dog in a retirement community.
Gloria Serge was by a retention pond behind her house in Fort Pierce, Florida, on Monday when the 10-foot-long alligator crawled up from the water and first tried to attack her dog.
The surveillance footage shows the reptile swimming in a direct path toward Serge’s dog before it rises out of the water and scampers up the embankment in pursuit of the animal.
The elderly woman was taken to the ground with the alligator then biting her feet, and then she was dragged into the water. While the woman's body was recovered from the retention pond, the dog survived.
"Please hurry!... It’s a huge gator. It’s huge, I don’t have anything to give to her," a neighbor is heard saying in a frantic 911 call released by Fort Pierce Police.
"It’s too late. Oh, my God," the woman is later heard saying.
"Did the gator pull her under?" the dispatcher asks.
"Yes," the neighbor screams.
"Alright, you don’t see any of her body, nothing sticking out?" the dispatcher says.
"Nothing, she’s gone," the woman replies.
The alligator, which is reported to weigh between 600 and 700 pounds, was trapped and killed by a nuisance gator trapper.
And now the video.
VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Watch here:
Tragic alligator attack caught on camera.
WARNING: viewer discretion advised. pic.twitter.com/0Pkns6q9Rn
— Noah Christopher (@DailyNoahNews) February 24, 2023
Backup here:
Absolutely awful thing to happen.
But just one question for the Reporter interviewing the neighbor....
Bro, what kind of question is: "Do you wish you would have gotten to her sooner?"
Really?
That's your question?
FacePalm.
And now the latest...
Now we have a "Gator Trainer" who was feeding a Gator when it suddenly clamped down on her hand.
She reacted instinctively and knew she had to jump into the tank if she was going to survive.
Watch this to learn why:
Backup here:
Gator Trainer Says She Leapt Into Cage to Save Her Own Life pic.twitter.com/T9kNlfKva8
— Noah Christopher (@DailyNoahNews) April 6, 2023
INCREDIBLE presence of mind and response by this young woman.
Wow!
She didn't panic, didn't freak out, just responded quickly and smartly and instinctively....and she survived.
But here's what I want to know...
Why did she need to be in the room with the Gator?
That doesn't seem safe.
You can just throw some food in from up top over the wall or the ceiling or something?
Or through a trap door?
You gotta go INTO the tank with the Gator?
Why in the world would you ever sign up for that job?
You think your job is bad, imagine doing this all day!
So glad she was ok!