14 foot, 800 pound alligator killed after dragging boat for two hours

Massive 14ft alligator killed after 800lb beast dragged terrified hunters’ boat around Arkansas lake for two hours

The 14ft, 800lbs behemoth was spotted by four men while they were out hunting on a lake in Arkansas at night. Travis Bearden, his father Gary, brother Cody and friend Tommy Kelley had a permit to hunt alligators and were on Lake Merrisach when the encountered the beast around 11pm. Travis, 31, said he spotted the alligator when sweeping his torch over the water where “you see red eyes” reflecting in the night.

One looked particularly big so they approached it but it managed to dive twice to evade them before they approached it “real slow”. The men cut their engine and honed in on their prey and Travis said he gripped his harpoon and took a shot. “I chucked the spear at it. Then I realised it was a very large gator. It pulled our boat like we had the motor running,” he said. The men then had terrifying two hour ride around the lake courtesy of the alligator.

“We weren’t real sure how big he was when we spotted him, and to our surprise after we harpooned it, it ended up being a giant,” Travis told 5News. Trey Reid, of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said it was the largest one caught in the history of the state’s alligator hunt. “It might be the largest taken in Arkansas, even back to the 19th century,” he said.

Arkansas began issuing permits to hunt alligators in 2008 in a bid to control numbers with a holder allowed to kill one alligator on public land on one of eight nights in September. An alligator has to be killed first by snaring or harpoon it, and then dispatching it with a shotgun or an underwater firearm.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1562256/massive-alligator-caught-dragged-hunters-boat-lake/