14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, a man in Florida, US, was arrested when police officers searching his house stumbled upon a baby alligator in his son's bedroom. The reptile lover now faces felony charges and might end up behind bars.
This is because, in the state of Florida, people are banned from removing either alligators or alligator eggs from the wild unless explicitly given permission to do so by the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The man had no idea he was doing anything wrong
The man, identified as Kevin Gill, insists that the only reason he brought the baby reptile back home with him, after having found it struggling to survive on its own in the wild, was that he hoped he and his son could save its life.
Apparently, the young alligator, measuring just 7 inches (about 18 centimeters) from head to tail, was sick and would have surely died if left to fend for itself.
The man imagined that he and his son could nurse it back to health and then hand it over to a local conservation group. The reptile could have then been returned to the wild or sent to some zoo to live happily ever after eating chicken and basking in the sun.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal because there’s millions of them. And they said they took them off the endangered species list,” Kevin Gill said in an interview, as cited by Global News.
The law forbids people to take alligators from the wild
Although the man and his 13-year-old son never meant to harm the baby reptile, let alone do anything illegal, the fact of the matter is that, as mentioned, Florida forbids people to remove alligators and alligator eggs from the wild.
Hence the fact that, having found the reptile while executing a search warrant, police officers took Kevin Gill into custody. The man now risks having felony charges filed against him and might end up in prison for quite a while.