6/10/2023 0 Comments Reggy the aligatorIt was exciting to come with a chair and your binoculars.” You met people you would never see who were here looking for him. Gutierrez and his wife, Gloria, hurried to the lake in hopes of catching a glimpse of Reggie before he was hauled away. My wife called me at work, and I got on the company radio and announced, ‘Poor Reggie’s been captured,’ ” said Danny Gutierrez, a longshoreman from Wilmington. “We knew with the weather heating up and his tendencies that this could happen and, in fact, it happened real quick,” said Jon Mukri, chief of the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.Ĭity officials, including Hahn, have said the alligator needed to be removed from the lake to protect parkgoers, but not everyone was pleased by Thursday’s developments. As a parks staffer watched, Reggie headed in - and the door was closed on his nearly two-year adventure. He spent Wednesday floating around the lake.īut about 2 p.m. The work was finished Tuesday, but Reggie wasn’t drawn inside right away. So on Monday, Regan asked for permission to build a big enclosure with chain-link fencing near the lake’s southwest shore - with a 10-foot opening facing the water where Reggie could be lured in, and a swinging door that could be slammed shut. “All of the vegetation was matted down, and I found this one pathway that it seemed like he was using.” “I went down there and found the area he was coming through,” Regan said. As Regan explained it, he visited the lake Sunday and deduced that Reggie would periodically come ashore by a particular cove, apparently to sun himself. One of the main heroes in the capture was Kevin Regan, an assistant general manager with the city’s parks department, who came up with a plan to nab Reggie. Initial reports were that the animal was in good shape. Curtis Eng, the zoo’s chief veterinarian.Īsked how he would examine a 6 1/2 -foot gator, he replied: “Carefully. He’s already been through too much stress today,” said Dr. “We want to make sure he doesn’t have any cuts or abrasions, and if he does, we’ll treat them. The gator presumed to be Reggie promptly received a medical exam at the zoo. Still, most officials proceeded as though they had the right critter. That water is not exactly high-quality water.” There’s no way to prove definitively that this is the same Reggie. And Gregory Randall, a wildlife specialist with the city agency, added: “It’s not like Reggie was tagged. So maybe instead of Reggie One, this is Reggie Two,” he said.īoks noted that all urban lakes and parks are dumping grounds for unwanted exotic pets. “The size of this alligator is somewhat larger than Reggie, and there would not have been enough time for Reggie to grow to that size. Not everyone was so sure, however, that the alligator at the zoo is the same one that surfaced and became a local sensation in 2005.Įd Boks, general manager of Los Angeles’ Department of Animal Services, whose staff was not involved in the capture but whose office provided the truck for the gator’s transport, said “a number of experts” are skeptical. The councilwoman said she was convinced that the city had its fugitive gator. employees who caught him, not alligator wranglers from somewhere else,” Hahn said. “It was an unbelievable day - and at the end of the day it was city of L.A. Workers duct-taped the alligator’s mouth shut, wrapped his head in a T-shirt and strapped him on a gurney for the journey to the zoo.
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