All photos courtesy of Mary Thorn
In Florida's public schools, children are taught what to do if they need to outrun an alligator. Laugh all you want, but it's an important skill to have should you ever find yourself in the state's famous swamps. Every so often you hear about people being eaten by gators—presumably these poor souls didn't pay attention in class. (In case you're wondering, you're supposed to run in zig-zags, because the reptiles' tiny legs apparently get all jammed trying to constantly change direction.)
But though a healthy fear of gators is instilled in every Floridian, Mary Thorn grew up to love them. In fact, she loves them so much that about a decade ago, she decided to adopt five of them. Four died, but one, named Rambo, remained. Today he's grown to a robust 125 pounds—too big, the Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC) says, for Thorn's property. She insists, however, that taking him away from her would do more harm than good, and her dispute with the FWC made national news this week, possibly because of her habit of dressing Rambo up like a person.
To learn more, I called Thorn up to hear all about how she trained Rambo and how he acts around her dogs.
VICE: Why do you love gators, and why did you decide you wanted five of them?
Mary Thorn: My brother owns a fish pond, and whenever gators get in his pond, I would get 'em out. I was just a tomboy; I loved the animals.You want me to describe why I decided to adopt the gators? What happened was somebody had taken them out of the lake and tried to kidnap them and keep them illegally. They were confiscated by officials down here and they were brought to the place where I worked. They were in a ten-gallon tank for the first four years of their life, in a dark closet. So nobody knew what to do really do with them, so I just took them under my wing and I raised them. My boss brought them to me––he got them from the FWC, and they didn't know what to do with them.
How do you train them to not kill you?
Well, when I got the gators, they couldn't even move their arms and legs and stuff. So they had to go through two or three years of physical therapy. Due to that, I was really close with them, so I just started training them. If they did something good, I'd give them a reward, and if they did something I didn't like, I would scold them. And they learned to do what they needed to do. They were given seven goals a year, and they accomplished most of their seven goals. still considering it. That's the latest word today.
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