By Mark Carpenter –
Adams County sees its fair share of “critters”, but not usually like the one found by Larry Dailey on Wednesday night. While mowing around the pond on his property, Dailey saw an unusual set of eyes staring back at him and realized, “Hey, there’s a gator in the pond.”
The elder Dailey called his son Nathan, one of the owners of Dailey’s Outfitters in Peebles, and told him to come on over, after convincing his son that he really hadn’t lost his mind. Nathan hopped on his tractor and made his way to his father’s property, where he verified that it indeed was an alligator roaming the grass and area around the pond.
“I have two young boys, five and seven years old, who play around that pond a lot,” said Nathan. “I don’t want them around alligators so my first call was to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to ask them how to proceed. They were quite surprised when I explained to them that we had a gator here in Adams County.”
The ODNR offered to send someone from Butler County to help capture the gator, but Dailey didn’t want to wait that long and chance the animal escaping, and since it was not a protected species, he decided to pull the shotgun trigger and eradicate the unwelcome visitor.
“I relly have no clue how the gator got there,” said Nathan. “Maybe it was someone’s pet and it got too big and they let it go, I don’t know.”
