Alligator found abandoned in Fargo

FARGO, N.D. – An abandoned alligator has found a temporary home among the Bison.

The roughly 2-foot-long reptile was discovered about 6:45 p.m. Thursday outside a Fargo apartment building in the 1800 block of 42nd Street South.

The apartment’s manager called Fargo police, and the gator was kept in a bathtub until community service officers arrived, Sgt. Joe Anderson said.

City ordinance prohibits keeping exotic animals as pets, including alligators.

Anderson said police didn’t determine who owned the animal, and no charges will be filed.

“How the person came to be in possession of it, I have no idea,” he said. “I think probably the owner of it realized that at 2 feet long it’s going to get bigger and tried to get rid of it.”

Police contacted the Red River Zoo and North Dakota State University, where zoology professor Will Bleier agreed to give the gator a place to crash.

Bleier, who chairs NDSU’s biological sciences department, said it’s hard to estimate the animal’s age because gators’ growth depends heavily on how much they’re fed and at what temperature they’re kept. If it was a wild gator, he said he’d guess it was about 2 years old.

Alligators and their crocodilian cousins normally have a “rather nasty” temperament, but this gator reportedly was handled a lot and was cold and not very active when it arrived, Bleier said.

“As alligators go, it seems like it’s fairly docile,” he said.

Bleier said he placed a call to the Chahinkapa Zoo in Wahpeton, N.D. – Director Kathy Diekman is a former student – to see if the zoo could take the alligator, but he hadn’t heard back yet.

“That’s my intent is to try to find a good home for it,” he said.

Bleier’s department is no stranger to gators. It previously had two of the reptiles as educational specimens for about 10 years.