Is this the soon-to-be announced remake of Dr. Doolittle with an all-woman cast? Or maybe the new Steve Irwin-type wildllife TV show? Maybe sometime in the future. This is Taylor Francis, who works at Everglades Outpost Wildlife Rescue in Homestead, Florida. The gator is Caspar, who is well-fed and used to his human handlers. Caspar weighs 250 pounds; Francis, not so much. Francis works with many different kinds of animals.
You may be wondering how a rescue operation has alligators and other exotic animals. Francis is glad to explain.
Not at all a dumb question! I’m happy to answer.
So on it being a rescue, all of our gators are what’s called “nuisance” caught gators. Meaning they were in someone’s pool, a golf course, basically too close to humans to the point that the animal clearly no longer feared humans, and is therefore a threat to the community and itself. So once captured they’re either sent to a sanctuary like ours, or put down. A life in captivity isn’t ideal, but it’s better than being served up at the local gator grill.
On the tigers, South Florida is one of the biggest places for the exotic animal trade, mainly cause it’s such a major hotspot for drug trafficking and black market stuff. A lot of drug dealers get exotic animals as pets, as like a status thing (when they get bored of Ferrari’s and mansions, they buy big cats, for example) so the DEA will do a bust and then be like “oh shit what do we do with the tiger?” That’s where we come in. Obviously the animal is already used to humans and therefore cannot be released (even if we could afford to fly it out wherever it’s native to, find a safe place to reintroduce it that isn’t territory already claimed by another individual of the same species etc.)
You can see more of Francis' images, featuring her coworker Quinton Glenn and lots of animals at Instagram. -via reddit