This article was originally published on VICE US.
It’s no secret that kids do a lot of dumb shit in college, even at the expense of innocent marine life. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that a few university students down in Florida would be willing to lug a dead gator onto campus just to take photos of it and rack up some likes on social media—which teens today so desperately crave.
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According to a local NBC affiliate, a few students at Florida Gulf Coast University did just that last weekend. Apparently they stumbled upon a dead alligator on the side of the road—a sight not too uncommon to the area—and decided it would be a great idea to drag it back to their dorm room. They then plopped the three-foot gator caracas on a bed and started posting pictures of it on Snapchat or whatever.
“I was scrolling through Twitter the other day and I saw this girl’s tweet that someone kidnapped the SoVi (South Village) gator and I was like, ‘What the heck?’” sophomore Kandace Tice told a local CBS affiliate. “So I clicked on the picture and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it looks like it’s in someone’s bed.’”
The school’s administration quickly got wind of the campus’s new viral social media star and located the culprits, slapping each of them with a warning. Then the school called in the de facto alligator police—Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission—who sent an officer to investigate.
“It was actually a road kill alligator that they found and that was confirmed by the officer examining the carcass,” Brian Norris, a spokesman for the commission, told the News-Press. “It was very clear evidence of it being road kill.”
Norris and his colleagues gave the kids a warning for possession of an alligator without proper permits, which, weirdly enough, is a legitimate offense in Florida.
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