You never know what ya might catch on a day of alligator hunting.
And one alligator hunter out of South Carolina landed a gator that they’ll never forget for the rest of their lives.
It all went down on September 30th in Ravenel, South Carolina. The gator hunter brought in an 11-footer to Cordray’s, a meat processing business in Ravenel.
11-footer? Yeah, that’s a pretty good sized beast if I must say so myself. However, what really caught the eye of the hunters and those working inside Cordray’s was the fact that there was a fully formed 3×3 antler from a whitetail buck deer stuck in the gator’s mouth.
Cordray’s wrote on their Facebook page on Monday:
“Talk about a mouth full! This old 11′ gator had a deer antler embedded in his lower jaw!”
According to Field & Stream, Cordray’s owner Michael Cordray captured the wild pics of the gator with the antler still lodged in the creature’s mouth, and then removed it.
The antler still appears to be attached to a bone, meaning that the deer was killed or scavenged by the gator, and wasn’t shed.
Cordray told McClatchy News:
“We determined it has been that way six months or less, and likely happened while the alligator was chewing.
It surprised us, too. We’ve seen a lot of strange things but we’ve never seen anything like that.
It just shows you the destructive power of an alligator, that they even try to eat the antlers… I’m guessing the deer was drinking water and the alligator popped out and grabbed it.”
Check it out:
