Watch As A 9-Foot Gator Is Dragged Out Of The Saltwater At A South Carolina Beach In Front Of Horrified Beachgoers

FACT: Alligators are a freshwater species. Often saltwater crocodiles are confused for alligators, but gators cannot survive for long periods of time in the saltwater.

FACT: The last thing on earth you’d ever want to see when chilling on the sand is a massive alligator swimming around in the surf. Furthermore, you wouldn’t want to see that alligator getting dragged up onto the beach alongside your cooler full of the Champagne of Beers.

Now that we’ve established the cold hard facts of crocodilian beach behavior, I think it’s important that we stop for a second and realize just how asinine it was that a 9-foot alligator was just swimming around in the surf waters off Pawleys Island, South Carolina. By any measure, 9-feet-long is a pretty good sized alligator, and definitely not one you want to be sharing your swimming space is. Sure, there was almost 0% chance of an attack (gators really don’t go out of their way to attack humans), but that doesn’t mean it’s not dodgy as hell.

I mean, just look at all those beachgoers forced to evacuate their chairs while animal control rescued the alligator (as it goes into a ‘death roll’ in order to break free of the lasso):

For those of you wondering, here is the typical range of the alligator in the United States:

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