Minnesota deer hunter crocodile
Courtesy Cory Klocek, Facebook

From the Assocated Press

A Minnesota man who was tracking a large buck on the opening weekend of deer hunting season wound up finding another prize for his collection when he came across a 3-foot alligator.

Cory Klocek was hunting Saturday on farmland in East Bethel, about 40 miles (64.37 kilometers) north of Minneapolis, when he took down with a shotgun what he described on Facebook as a “beautiful 10-point buck,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. Right about that time he came around a pond and spotted the alligator.

“No clue how it got there, or why,” Klocek wrote. “I’m guessing someone had it as a pet and released it when it got too big.”

Well… this was a first for me… Great Minnesota gun opener… Odd Minnesota opener…. this morning I harvested a…

Posted by Cory Klocek on Saturday, November 7, 2020

Klocek, 35, contacted a local conservation officer with the state Department of Natural Resources and got the go-ahead to shoot the alligator as well. He retrieved a .22-caliber handgun and headed back to the pond.

“Only in 2020 can you go out… for deer gun season opener in Minnesota and shoot an alligator,” Klocek said Monday in an interview. “I’m still at a loss of words.”

Department of Natural Resources spokesman Joe Albert confirmed Klocek got the green light from his agency to take out the reptile because it has “no special protection.”

Klocek said he intends to pair the buck and the gator together for a “fun taxidermy piece.”

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79 COMMENTS

        • “whadya get when you hybridize a coho, a walleye and a muskellunge?”

          That one’s easy- A Cowalski. (Pronounced makes better sense) Was the original MN DNR study to find a fish as delectable as a walleye but would grow to maturity faster so they crossed the walleye with coho salmon. That seemed to work quite well but the new hybrid was an even worse fighter as a sporting fish than a walleye, so to boost its strength and aggressiveness they crossed the Cowall hybrid with a muskellunge, which, of course, the government peeps thought would be the best of 3 worlds. Well, the result was a fast-growing, delicious and agressive species- the Cowalski. Problem? It turned out to be too dumb to swim.

    • They got all twitterpatted & flustered in Chiraq the other year when a slightly larger gator was spotted in a pond. Paid a dude from FloriDUH to catch. In Chiraq they were only concerned about the critter(and it’s illegal to kill a coyote in ILLinoyed!).

      • “An average of 7,000 coyotes are harvested each year in Illinois. Approximately 75% are taken by hunters and 25% by trappers.”

        huh?

    • {Crocodile or Alligator}

      My money’s on a Alligator.

      I live in central Florida. It’s kinda rare that a Crocodile is found this far north. They prefer it warmer, like in the the Everglades.

      Gators, on the other hand, can be found as far north as Virginia.

      My vote is an Alligator.

      Here’s the difference. Notice that Alligator young have pronounced yellow stripes on them :

      https://myfwc.com/wildlifehabitats/profiles/reptiles/american-crocodile/

  2. “Only in 2020 can you go out… for deer gun season opener in Minnesota and shoot an alligator,” Klocek said”

    3 foot reptiles in Minnesota?

    Sure glad climate change is a Chinese hoax, it would be terrible if tropical animals and diseases, like west Nile virus, were moving north.

      • The definitive word of war hero and former astronaut James Campbell. Bask in the reflected glory of this great man.

        All Hail.

        • You forgot he’s the first man to climb Mount Everest solo without oxygen *and* free-dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench (about 7 miles deep!), both on the same day!

          All Fucking Hail, Indeed!

          Consider yourself blessed and honored to even know such greatness! 🙂

    • Winters are still cold enough that it wouldn’t have survived. Alligators and tropical snakes get found all over the north every year in Spring, Summer, and Fall because people get them as pets and then turn them loose.

      Hell, I’ve caught African cichlids in PA lakes during the summer. You’ll never catch them through the ice.

      As for climate change, bring it on. The entire northern hemisphere, including china, is re-greening, forests are expanding, deserts are shrinking, more and more land is becoming arable for human use, plants we grow for food are becoming more productive. CO2 is plant food. There has been a CO2 famine for centuries and you leftards should thank us for releasing it back into the atmosphere.

      • In the 1970’s the learned men were telling us the earth was on the brink of an ice age. If global warming is happening and if it’s man made then maybe we dodged that bullet.

        • And don’t forget the ‘Population Explosion’ and we’re all going to starve around the same time late 60s early 70s.

          Like you said, stick around long enough and you get to see all kinds of dooms day non-sense. The China Virus, although real and probably walked out of the Wuhan lab on someone techs boot, will not render mankind extinct no matter what the media says.

          A Polar Bear hunt would be great and give me an excuse for a new rifle/cannon. Plus I could annoy the PETA leaning people at work.

        • “In the 1970’s the learned men were telling us the earth was on the brink of an ice age.”

          No, they were not. You saw some articles in Time magazine from the main stream media and became convinced that it was scientific fact.

        • No, they were not. A minor report was misinterpreted by some sensationalist news media and screamed about very excitedly. Even as the scientist who wrote the paper and many others were trying to say no, a new ice age was not indicated and the opposite problem was.

          Metro NY area newspapers were especially at fault for pumping up the ice age “scare”. I remember newspaper articles on the topic, taking front page column space above the fold. Articles saying it was all a stupid fantasy were below the fold or deeper inside the paper.

          Made for some really bad Hollywood movies though, so it had that going for it.

        • “everybody didn’t think the earth was flat in 1492”

          You are correct, most civilizations had known that the earth was a globe thousands of years before that.

          It was only the ignorant Europeans, misled by their imaginary deities, that believed the earth was flat and beyond the edge be dragons.

        • I was taught about the coming ice age in elementary school.
          Somebody clearly thought it was established scientific fact at the time.

          Methinks enuf and Censor are here to represent the Ministry of Truth and rewrite history.

        • Miner – 1st, jwm didn’t say it was fact. He quoted what was being said. If the press is not learned men -then Trump has in fact won by November 5th. You can’t have it both ways. In 64 or 65 my science teacher had a class discussion on Global Cooling well before those articles (News Week ’75 & Time ’74) you talk about. Telling us farm boys we better start looking at what crops are suited in the Canada growing season. He then did a short dissertation of how and why. Man had nothing to do with it. We are small potatoes compared to Mother Nature’s wrath.
          The Socialist version of history would have the 5 major Ice age periods separated by Republican presidents.

        • to miner49, who posted:
          November 10, 2020 at 11:39
          “In the 1970’s the learned men were telling us the earth was on the brink of an ice age.”

          No, they were not. You saw some articles in Time magazine from the main stream media and became convinced that it was scientific fact.”

          that’s not true. there was a scientific consensus among many atmospheric scientists, and over 200 studies. even the CIA published a report on the strategic implications of global cooling.

          since then, the media has tried to memory-hole all that.

      • Remember in the 80’s how acid rain was the doom of us all? And the ozone layer is shrinking and gonna be the end of us. Now look at how it’s recovering rapidly

        • Not to mention the Peak Oil crisis. I remember seeing those stupid billboards showing us almost out of oil, of course with the Green Communist Deal and that idiot Biden banning fracking we could be in real trouble.

        • “Remember in the 80’s how acid rain was the doom of us all? And the ozone layer is shrinking and gonna be the end of us. Now look at how it’s recovering rapidly”

          Yep, the use of catalytic converters has reduced the sulfur dioxide output and led to a substantial decrease in acid rain.

          And the ban on CFCs has indeed reduced the ozone layer depletion substantially.

          I’m glad to see that you appreciate all the good work the EPA has done to reduce pollution, under the Biden/Harris administration we’ll see an even greater reductions in pollutants leading to better health and a longer life for American citizens.

        • Go to any major chinese city and then talk to me about how the warnings of pollution and acid rain were nonsense.

          People here whine like babies about wearing a mask during a pandemic while people in China and India wear them just not to die of lung disease due to the air over there.

    • Miner the whiner, I see you get your information from the AOC talking points section of retardedilliberalsareus.com. My advice is go outside, look up see that big red ball in da sky? That determines climate.

    • It’s racist to believe in climate change now:

      1. Most of the worlds trash and pollution comes from Asia.

      2. Asians aren’t of European origin.

      3. Complaining about trash and pollution is complaining about Asia.

      4. Complaining about Asia makes you racist.

      5. Therefore, the climate change narrative is racist.

    • The Chinese clearly don’t believe in global warming, they’re the biggest polluters on the planet except maybe the Indians.

  4. (shakes head) So some mindbright likely saw his subtropical reptile pet grow from a baby into a juvenile that got too big for its little cage, and chose to release it into a MN pond and thought that was a good idea. Gators can survive short term freezes when they occur in the South, but not a full MN winter. That original owner should have known better.

    • Not really much different than the city dwellers who figure out they either can’t care for a dog or don’t want it and take it for a one-way car ride to the country. We must’ve seen 25 of those over the 30 years we lived on a farm just outside of the Des Moines western suburbs.

  7. I went alligator hunting and came back with a crocodile once. There was a long discussion with the FWC that day.

    Didn’t really enjoy the experience that much. Was expensive too. Never put in for tags again.

    • I’m thinking so too.
      Still pretty unusual.

      It would probably have been fish food in another couple of months.

    • Unless juvenile caymen have extremely short and rounded snouts, that is definitely an alligator.

      Alligators have extremely rounded and robust looking snouts — very similar to northern pike. Crocodiles have more pointed snouts. And caymen have longer, less robust, and more pointed snouts that crocodiles.

      • I agree with uncommon. I’m an amateur herpetologist who owned and bred several types of reptiles in my younger years long ago (a now-embarrassing chapter of my life I was happy to forget until this article popped up today). Caymens typically have long snouts, while alligators have shorter, broader profiles.

        • I have no qualifications other than being a Floridian but I’m saying gator too. Also going to be completely wasted because I’ve seen what happens when you give Midwesterners gator meat.

        • “I agree with uncommon. I’m an amateur herpetologist who owned and bred several types of reptiles in my younger years…”

          Soooooo…

          Was that a euphemism for playing ‘Hide the Snake’ with girlfriends?

          *snicker* 😉

          (An early girlfriend of mine bought me the first reptile of my collection that I amassed back then…)

    • It was dead anyway in another month or so. You must not live where there’s many invasive species. I built a literal concentration camp for Cuban tree frogs, complete with a gas chamber.

      • 1) It was dead anyway in another month or so.
        2)You must not live where there’s many invasive species.

        pick one

    • It was certainly going to die in the Minnesota cold, probably in a matter of days. Gators are also everywhere in the south, and are not only commonly hunted but they get hit by cars and shit all the time. It’s not like he was endangering a species.

      • In Florida, they destroy cars traveling on roads and even airplanes that hit them while taking off and landing…

    • Freezing to death is so much better then being shot, right?

      I hate people who give idiotic suggestions about stuff they know nothing about and call others names.

      • hypothermia is known to be a fairly painless way to die, actually. So much so that a lot of people have it find them unawares. They feel a need to sleep and then just don’t wake up.

        • “They feel a need to sleep and then just don’t wake up.”

          Yup, just before you go, you suddenly feel warm. That’s why it’s not uncommon to find them dead with their clothes nearby…

  13. hypothermia is known to be a fairly painless way to die, actually. So much so that a lot of people have it find them unawares. They feel a need to sleep and then just don’t wake up.

    WWW,BONANZU,COM

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