Don't Feed the Alligators

This event happened a while ago, but I was just reminded of it by a friend and I need some place to talk about it, so why not on an environmental blog?  Anyways, I'm sure that everyone at FGCU is very much aware of the rule "Do not feed the alligators."  Most of the FGCU campus is wildlife preserve, so with that large of a habitat comes the animals that live there; this includes alligators.  Now, normally the alligators stay in the more swampy areas of the preserve, away from human interaction.  However, instinct calls them to move where ever their prey moves, so sometimes the gators will drift into the waters closer to campus. Let it be said that, as hard as it is to believe, alligators are more scared of us than we are of them.  Once they've realized they are in human territory, the alligators will normally just get their food and swim back to their homes.  Yet, if the students on campus start to feed them little bits of food as they walk past, the alligators will start associating humans as a food supply and become less afraid.  What happens when an alligator loses its fear of humans?  It starts to slowly become more bold, and we risk having said alligator coming out of the water and attacking us for our food.  This is an extreme danger to the students on campus, so if the staff catches people feeding the gators, not only will that person be fined, but the staff will have to kill the alligator.  This came up in a conversation I was having with my friend because we got off on a tangent about Gary the Gator, an alligator that used to swim around in the lake by Sovi.  The poor animal had to be put down because the staff caught students coming out of Sovi and throwing their leftover food out into the lake for Gary to snack on.  It wasn't fair to Gary, poor innocent Gary, to have to die because students didn't want to follow the rules.  Please, for Gary's sake, refrain from feeding the alligators, they are very capable of hunting their own food.  Don't let another innocent animal die.