LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A woman in Louisville, Kentucky, stepped out of her house on Tuesday morning and found a 3-foot alligator on her porch.
Jamesetta Townsend told WLKY that she walked of her house on River Park Drive around 10 a.m. and noticed the alligator. She described it as being about 3 feet long.
Townsend said she called the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife, who removed the alligator, according to the news outlet. She told WAVE had no idea how the alligator got into her yard.
Finding an alligator in Florida is not abnormal, but in Kentucky, it is. Townsend said she never thought she would ever come face to face with one in Louisville, according to WAVE.
“I looked down and I saw it laying there, and I hollered for my husband to come and look,” Townsend told the news station. “So he came and looked, and he said, ‘Well what is it?’ So I went and got my son Terrence, and he came out to look and he said, ‘Mom, that’s an alligator.’”
Officials with Kentucky Fish and Wildlife in a statement that they occasionally get reports that there are alligators in the state, according to WAVE.
“There are reasons why we have laws in place prohibiting the importation of exotic and inherently dangerous animals. Two reasons are potential transmission of diseases and introduction of species that can harm Kentucky’s native wildlife, people, pets or livestock. Alligators don’t make good pets, as even a smaller one can injure a person. When an alligator grows beyond a person’s capacity to care for it, oftentimes it gets released into the wild, and then it becomes a potential danger to others,” said a spokesperson from Kentucky Fish and Wildlife, according to WLKY.
Wildlife officials said they took possession of the alligator and tried to find its potential owners by knocking on doors in the area but were unsuccessful, the news outlet reported.