Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (3 page)

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The wildlife worker behind the table doesn’t flinch, processing the py-

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thon like a donated cake at a bake sale.

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Lynn’s husband stands by holding a big, fat lizard across his chest

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as if it’s a baby he’s trying to burp. The patch on his zookeeper shirt

identifies him as Gator Ron, which helps explain his limp. He has an

alligator tooth embedded in his leg from a long-ago incident with one

of his favored pets. (“It was my fault,” he says, sounding like a battered

spouse. “She didn’t mean to hurt me.”)

Despite his hobble, Ron’s a young seventy with a Mr. Green Jeans

personality and a Captain Kangaroo mustache. He says he loves Goli-

ath, his Savannah monitor, but he just can’t walk him much due to his

limp. “He needs more exercise than I can give him. But he’s really no

trouble,” he says, as he strokes the lizard’s back. “He likes watching TV

with me.”

Savannah monitors come from the grasslands of Africa. This one has

dusty-gray speckled scales with a blunt snout and a deep-blue, forked

tongue. Goliath also has a white scar on his back that Ron suspects

he got from a heat lamp while living with a previous owner. The non-

poisonous monitors can live to be twelve years old and have a reputa-

tion for being escape artists. Goliath doesn’t look in any shape to be so

crafty. In fact, he seems content in Ron’s arms and cute in a snaggle-

tooth-bulldog kind of way.

The monitor is handicapped, Ron explains to a wildlife worker. He

can’t move his back legs. “He was like that when I got him about a year

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ago. He gets around fine just dragging them.”

The wildlife worker’s brows wrinkle with concern. “I’m going to take

him back and have the vet look at him.” She disappears with the reptile

into the large tent.

While Ron and Lynn anxiously wait, they share stories about their

personal zoo in Brooksville. Lynn pulls out a granny-brag-book of pet

photos: there’s Princess, a 9-foot-long alligator from her reptile posse;

an African pygmy goat; a housecat; a mutt; and their most adored pet,

Charlie, a 260-pound Montana mountain lion. No snapshots of their

grandchildren.

They spend sunup to sundown, seven days a week, 365 days a year

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caring for about seventy-five animals. They share a mobile home with

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bearded dragons, a ball python, red-ear slider tortoises, and a house

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cat. Their backyard is filled with dozens of chickens, a red bone hound,

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the goat, Charlie, and a fiberglass pool of alligators. They’re on a first-

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name basis with state FFWCC officers, who often call on them to take

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in captured animals. Ron says, “We never have too much that we won’t

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take in anything that has nowhere else to go.”

Gator Ron tells Florida wildlife officials that Goliath, his savannah monitor, is just

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too much for him. His wife, Lynn, on the left, has already turned in a ball python.

Photo by author.

Ron and Lynn Gard are technically “exhibitors.” Their license allows

them to keep the mountain lion, alligators, big snakes, and other dan-

gerous animals at their house as long as they publicly exhibit them a

few times a year. There are scores like the Gards. According the U.S. De-

partment of Agriculture, Florida has more animal exhibitors than any

other state. That’s about 475 and doesn’t include zoos and circus acts,

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of which there are dozens. Granted, a handful of those USDA licenses

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are for dog acts and pony rides, but Florida still has about seventy-

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five more licensees than the next-most animal-crazed state: California,

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naturally.

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Ron and Lynn can’t afford the liability insurance to allow the public

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to tour their five-acre backyard zoo, so they load the critters into a van

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with “Gator Encounters” painted on the side and hit the road. Most Fri-

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days they schlep a sideshow of gators to Howard’s Flea Market in Ho-

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mosassa. Lynn spreads artificial grass over a 6-foot table and then tops

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it with a live gator that’s sometimes just as long. Their jaws are taped

shut. Ron educates bystanders about the animals and lets the curious

touch their soft bellies. A few even hold the smaller toothy reptiles for

photos. “We’ve had grandmothers get their picture made with them,”

Ron says. “They can say, ‘Hey, I got this in F-L-A!’”

Before Charlie grew too big to control, the mountain lion accompa-

nied them to the flea market. “Sometimes he would take off, and I’d

yell, ‘Step on his leash!’” Ron says, putting his hand by his mouth, mim-

icking his call-of-the-wild to shoppers. “People there loved him and still

ask about him. ‘Hey, where’s Charlie?’ they say. But we can’t take him

no more. He’s got the strength of ten men. Wherever he wants to go,

you go with him.”

For a while, the Gards also exhibited the world’s ten deadliest

snakes—an eastern diamondback rattlesnake, a black mamba, a king

cobra, viper, anaconda and others filled with enough venom to drop a

grown man. Ron seems befuddled by the show’s lack of success: “Why

people wouldn’t give a dollar or two to look at the ten deadliest snakes

in the world is weird to me.”

At home they kept the snakes sealed off in a small bedroom and fol-

lowed a strict protocol of never opening a cage solo. But even the best

plans can fall prey to the unpredictability of a wild animal. Eventually

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it happened. One escaped.

Ron was dropping a mouse into the glass cage of his 8-foot black

mamba when the snake slithered free. The black mamba is known as

the “bottom’s-up snake.” Lore has it that if bitten, you only have time

to down one drink before you die.

The situation was grim.

“I told her to shut the door,” Ron says of Lynn. “We had put seals

around the doors and windows because we knew we could never let

one escape. If it got out of the room, it could get out of the trailer.

Even if it killed both of us, at least it wouldn’t get out and kill someone

else.”

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There they were, stuck in a hot, stuffy room walled with poisonous

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snakes, trying to catch a loose one whose bite could kill them before

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they could guzzle a glass of water. He says, “I figured we were going to

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die that day.”

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Using a snake-handler’s hook, Ron eventually caught the deadly ser-

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pent and returned it to the cage. After that, Ron decided to get rid of

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the snakes. “That one thing made us think that maybe it wasn’t a good

idea after all,” Ron laughs. “It was getting way too dangerous, and we

decided to get rid of them while we still had all our fingers.”

They still have a nonpoisonous ball python and help any wild snakes

they find stretched across a road. Ron will pull over and wait with the

engine running while Lynn jumps out, snatches up the reptile by its

tail, and slings it as far away from the road as possible. She climbs back

in, and they go on their merry way. He says, “We just can’t bear to let

one get run over by a car.”

Gator Ron didn’t always have a soft spot for serpents or such a fa-

natical love for any wild animal. His attitude changed when his family

vacationed at a rustic log cabin in the Smoky Mountains. His daugh-

ters, sleeping in the loft, were scared by noises coming from the attic.

Upon investigating, Ron discovered a long, black snake. He dragged it

outside and shot it dead with his .22 pistol. “I hated snakes then.”

Later a nearby resident told Ron his kill was probably one of the

black rat snakes that had been raising a family in the cabin’s attic for

almost twenty years. The snakes mate for life, he told Ron.

“Right then my whole life changed with reptiles,” he says. “From

then on, everything I did was for animals, especially reptiles. I was so

upset with myself. It still bothers me.” For a moment he looks as if he’s

about to cry.

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By their own accounts, Gator Ron and Lynn have always been risk

takers even though they didn’t acquire a zoo of exotic animals until

they moved Florida. They used to race Volkswagen Beetles off-road.

“She was the only woman to win driving backwards,” Ron brags. Before

retirement, Gator Ron worked primarily as a chef and they moved a lot.

He jokes that they lived in 150 places all over the country. They raised

five children. They were living in Miami when they made the leap to the

scrub of Hernando County just so they could house more than exotic

snakes. (By law, the state requires 2½ acres for alligators and 5 acres

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for big cats.) Land was certainly cheaper in the wilds of central Florida

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than in Miami.

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They put in a fiberglass pool and started filling it with alligators.

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They built a cage and playpen for a big cat, and installed an intercom

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system between the house and zoo area for safety and convenience.

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Mind you, they live on Ron’s Social Security and Lynn’s wages from an

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office job.

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Although they primarily rescue their pets, they bought Charlie from

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a breeder when he was only five days old. He’s now seven years old. Ron

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says he’s never tried to bite. “I bottle-fed him for six months. He thinks

I’m his mother,” Ron says. “Now that he’s grown, I can go into his cage

and lie on top of him and kiss him on the mouth.” Lynn, who’s retrieved

more snapshots, pulls out a photo showing just that.

Charlie is Lynn’s baby, too. She taught him to play an altered form

of soccer with a heavy-duty rubber ball, the Kong toy of big cats. “He

purrs,” Ron says. “The other day I called down on the intercom and she

was petting him and I could hear him purring. I told her I was getting

jealous.”

“Of him or her?” I ask.

“Both!” he says. They laugh.

Their mood darkens when the wildlife worker returns. The news isn’t

good. “A vet has looked him over, and his back is broken, which has left

his back legs paralyzed,” she says of the monitor. “He has broken legs

and his lump may be cancer. He is going to need a lot of medical help.

We just don’t know . . .”

There’s a long pause. No one wants to mention euthanizing Goliath,

but it’s obvious that may be the monitor’s plight. Lynn looks nervous.

Ron pipes up, “It doesn’t seem to bother him. He gets around fine. I

can hardly keep up with him. I’ll take him back if no one wants him.”

“Let me talk to the vet again,” the worker says, grimacing.

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“If no one wants him, I’ll keep him,” Ron calls out again. “I want him

to have a good home.”

The worker forces a smile and disappears back into the jungle of col-

lected pets.

Underneath the tent, folding tables are stacked with cages and plas-

tic containers holding iguanas, crested dragons, hedgehogs, tarantulas,

colorful parrots, and an albino skunk. No primates or felines of any

kind. Reptiles are the homeless pet du jour. Most are out back.

An African spurred tortoise the size of a giant beach ball futilely at-

tempts a jail break. Estimated to weigh between 100 and 150 pounds,

the domed-shell tortoise is trapped inside a dry plastic fishpond. He

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incessantly tries to get a stubby foot over the edge, his claws scrapping

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against the wall of hard plastic. No one else seems to notice. He looks

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pissed.

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FFWCC started the Animal Amnesty Days with constrictors in mind.

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Pythons, boa constrictors, and anacondas aren’t venomous, although

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they can bite and have more than one hundred needle-sharp teeth.

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They kill by wrapping their sinuous, muscular, scaly bodies around

their prey and squeezing the life out of them. Then they swallow their

catch whole.

Wildlife agents began seeing Burmese pythons in the Everglades

in the 1980s, although a breeding population wasn’t confirmed until