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Real, Wild Mascots on Campus
3-31-2003 I just got off spring break, which reminds me of a little visit I made two spring breaks ago to the University of Florida’s campus in Gainesville, Florida (wow, the University of Florida is in Florida!). I was visiting friends who attend UF, and my girlfriend was with me, hooray! Anyway, there’s a small pond by one of my friend’s dorm on campus. It looks like there’s an alligator in the pond – some of my friends thought it was fake, others thought it was real. FYI: an alligator is the mascot of the University of Florida. So we’re standing on a wooden deck over the pond, trying to determine if the alligator on the sandbar in the middle of the pond is real or not. We see it move a little, but a friend of mine says that could be animatronics or something. There’s no fences or anything to really keep the gator in the pond, so it seems like the gator would just be fake for safety reasons. Another friend is eating some yummy, greasy (ewwww) fast food, and decides to throw a French fry into the pond to feed a little turtle. Then we see a sign by the pond that says not to feed the alligator. Then the alligator slips into the water and swims to where the fry hit the water, which just so happens to be in the direction of where we are standing on the wooden deck. The turtle got the fry before the gator got there. So we figured the gator might eat the turtle - you know, the whole food chain thing taught in elementary school. But that didn’t happen - the gator just kept swimming towards us - so some of us were kinda afraid the gator was gonna climb the deck railing and attack us. Fortunately, it just swam under our feet, under the deck. Then some of us were kinda afraid the gator was gonna break through the wooden deck and attack us from below. Fortunately, it didn’t, and we just left. Moral of the story: if you’re
ever at the University of Florida, keep an eye out for real, wild mascots
roaming the campus.
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