Gator Cop

Spate Of Alligator Attacks Keeps Trapper Kevin Garvey Busy

(Christian Science Monitor) 

In the back of his truck lie the tools of his trade: a catchpole with a loop of wire at the end that he slips over small alligators like a noose. Larger reptiles are hauled in from the water using a system of hooks, rods, reels, ropes, and sometimes a harpoon that pierces the hide but doesn't kill the alligator. Garvey must then leap on his catch from behind, straddle its back, and put pressure on its eyes to lift the head. Finally, he binds the jaws with duct tape and rope.

With his shorn hair, camouflage shirt, and sturdy boots, Garvey bears the look of a Marine sergeant. But his 180-pound physique, though toned, is surprisingly modest for a man who wrangles alligators up to four times that weight.

Garvey tried other jobs before trapping — in construction and property maintenance. But he didn't find them fulfilling. He thinks trapping animals is providing a service to society and, when he can save them, to the animals. He wanted to be a trapper so badly that he had his name on the waiting list for this post for eight years.

In that sense, Garvey is like many of Florida's gator cops — they harbor a deep fealty to the reptiles. "These trappers aren't out there with the idea that animals are evil," says wildlife biologist Lindsay Hord, coordinator of the FWCC's nuisance alligator program. "They're out there because they appreciate that they're not."

In his spare time, Garvey visits schools to drum into children that humans and alligators can live in relative harmony — and to teach them how. One example: Never take a dog to the water's edge to drink. His two children — Austin, 9, and Kayla, 15 — think what their dad does is "cool."

As he trudges along a canal bank here in Sunrise, just a few miles from where an alligator fatally seized a jogger, Garvey cups his hands and imitates a mating call in the hope of luring his latest target out of hiding. It is a series of brief, gruff bellows, which today elicit no response.

The biggest alligator Garvey ever caught was 13 foot, 4 inches long. Those five feet or larger must be killed when captured: According to the state, they're too big to relocate. If the alligator is under five feet, Garvey will relocate it to the Everglades — a result he prefers. "I've been around animals all my life," he says. "I got into business to defend them, not to give them trouble."

While most attacks are the result of human misjudgment, Garvey accepts that not all alligators keep to themselves. He has seen them climb chain-link fences and heard tearful tales from dog owners who have had them barge through patio screens and seize pets.

He once found a four-foot alligator in the stomach of an eight-footer. Others had footballs, garbage bags, and tennis balls inside them — more proof of suburban, or perhaps alligator, encroachment.

Sometimes, after leaving alligators temporarily trussed with duct tape and rope in the back of his truck outside his house in Pompano Beach, they wriggle free. He found one escapee head-butting a neighbor's front door and had to wrangle another out of his garden pond. Still another shimmied off his truck and into the street, where he performed a "death roll" in front of amazed residents: Alligators can spin up to 100 times a minute to disable or drown their prey.

Garvey knows their jowly jujitsu skills all too well. A scar on one leg testifies to the time an 8½-foot alligator rolled him. And he still has a stiff thumb from another encounter with a jaw. "I was afraid when I got bit that my wife would want that to be the end of my career," he says. "But she accepts it's my work. As long as I bring home the money and both my arms and legs, it's OK."