I know. Go ahead and give it to me. This is very insensitive and has poor timing. I’m not good with sensitive or sacred cows…or in this case, reptiles. At least I didn’t go with my first heartless idea which consisted of an alligator eating Mickey Mouse. Pissing off the NRA, Trump, and Republicans I’m good with. Disney on the other hand….ugh.
If there was a huge money-making alligator industry and rednecks used them to overcompensate for their tiny penises, there would be a trade organization buying off congressmen to make sure anyone could buy an alligator at any time.
Right now the Democrats in the U.S. Senate are conducting a filibuster to force the Republicans to schedule a vote on gun control. This has totally stopped all Senate business….which means it’s pretty much like any day in the Senate.
Republicans HATE to talk about gun control. The only issue they hate talking about more is Donald Trump. If you really wanna flummox a GOP office holder, ask him about Trump’s revolving position on guns.
Creative note: I’ve had a theme with alligators the past few days. Last week I drew Donald Trump with alligator arms (played that off a Geico commercial). Today I drew a commissioned cartoon with crocodiles for a brand new client that’s based outside the United States (Claytoonz is going international. You’ll see it Friday). Now today I drew this. I can’t help it. I like reptiles.
I really like reptiles. I once worked in the reptile house of a small zoo in northeast Louisiana in the late 1980’s. My favorite story from that brief adventure comes from the day we cleaned the alligator pool. I didn’t do any actual cleaning but it was my job to keep the gators and Alligator Snapping Turtles away from the cleaners. I was armed only with a stick. There were five gators in the tank. They were all under six feet long except for this one mother. Before we could drain the pool we had to get one gator out which we did with a lasso. That took several hours. Some genius designed the pool where the drain was in the deep end and had to be manually unplugged. Nobody likes diving with alligators.
The alligators cooperated for the most part. The turtles, not so much. In fact, the turtles concerned me a lot more than the gators.
A large chunk of my childhood was spent in Louisiana. When I was a kid my older sister and I swam in a bayou with them. As a teenager my buddies and I swam in the same water. We never had an issue. When I was around ten or eleven we actually had two pet baby alligators, which was and still is illegal. I didn’t know that at the time and thankfully, the statute of limitations has long passed. We only had them for about a week. They weren’t as cuddly as we thought they might be. I got bit a lot. They never bit my sister once.
I do feel really bad for the parents who lost a child this week in Orlando to an alligator attack. That city had one tragic week. Losing a child under any circumstance is a horrible thing to live with. I know. It’s something I’ve been very close to. I’m sure Disney will never make this family wait in line for Pirates Of The Caribbean ever again.
A lot of people are asking questions about the parents, just like when that Cincinnati gorilla thing happened. Thing is, things happen. This is a freak occurrence that’s a true tragedy. I don’t think there are any safety measures that can prevent something like this happening once in a million years, especially after you build tourist resorts on a swamp.
Before posting this I searched for hashtags and one of them is “Disney Gator” which sounds a lot happier than it really is.
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CLAYTOONZ 
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