Holy Shiite.....things you do not want to run into when you get up in the night to make a quick raid on the refrigerator. He looks like he is lot a beef on the hoof. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...mashed-way-house-giant-11-foot-ALLIGATOR.html
A few years ago, my next door neighbor heard multiple knocks at her front door one night at around 2AM. When she opened the door, there was a ten-foot gator staring at her, and the sound she had just heard evidently came from the gator's tail slapping against the door as it moved around on the front porch ceramic tiles to find the warmest spot to lay on. Crazy!
How far did the visitor stray from "home?" (And you thought the real estate agent said gated community, not gator community... )
Probably not far. We have lakes everywhere here so gators are all over the place. It was funny though because when the neighbor told me the story the next day, my first question was, "So did you see which direction the gator headed when it left your porch?" She said, "Yeah, he headed straight towards your backyard."
I really don't know what would I do in such a situation. I guess, noone is ready for this. I like traveling, so I look through travel forums in order to find out interesting information about different countries. And I never read about such situations. I haven't been to Florida, but I always wanted. Having read your post, frankly speaking, I've become a little bit afraid of going there.
Gators typically are quite shy and want nothing to do with you. They spend the vast majority of their day sleeping on the banks of ponds. If you take some really basic precautions, you have nothing to fear. The most basic precaution is to assume any body of fresh or brackish water has gators in it. That means you do not sit on the dock and dangle your feet in the water, or if you are in a boat, dangle your arm in the water. If you are fishing, be careful reaching for fish you are pulling out of the water. Certainly during the daytime, it's rare to see them more than a few feet from a body of water.
Gators are lazy frickin' pigs. The reservoir next to me (Medard Park) has thousands of the damn things, including a couple of monsters that look like dinosaurs, and pretty much all they ever do is sun themselves and grunt from being overstuffed. Every one of them is bloated to the max... because they've filled up on my bass and catfish. Dammit. They wouldn't know what to do with an arm in the water if you hit them in the head with the soggy end. Just for the record, fatal gator attacks in the entire US average well under one per year. That's about 25x less than dogs. Pretty much the last thing to worry about.