What were you doing when you were 12-years of age? I bet wrestling a huge alligator wasn’t one. For me it was more like eating glue and crying about going to school.
12-year-old Joey Maffo however leapt on top of an alligator who had attacked a neighbour of his while she had been out walking her dogs in the South Carolinian town of Hilton Head.
50-year-old Tamra Shattuck had been attacked earlier in the day and bitten on the foot by an 8 foot (2.4 meter) alligator.
In what the Huffington Post have, quite rightly, referred to as the ‘world’s most most epic beatdown of a reptilian foe’ young Maffo tracked the gator to its lagoon lair and – with the help of his 68-year-old Grandpa – dragged it up onto the bank and trussed it up with tape.
Joe Maffo, the boy’s grandfather takes up the story from here as he explained it to ABC. “I went down and just let [Joey] fight it and hold it until it got to 16 feet out where I could reach it,” said Maffo Snr. “I stood at the edge of the water and reached out with a pole and put it around its neck and pulled it up to shore, and then he pulled the rope tight. I got on the gator and he came over and taped it.”
He jumped on the back of an alligator twice his size and fucking duck tapped it! This kid’s a hero of the highest order!
Anyway, the state has decreed that the alligator must be destroyed as it has rather developed a taste for human flesh. As for young Maffo he’s rightly been vetted as a hero.
Apparently in the American South though, gator wrangling is a right of passage for young boys… Doesn’t sound like my cup of tea.
Image: Huffington Post
