Judy Cochran is one grandma that you don’t want to mess with.
She owns a rifle and she knows how to use it.
She also hunts gators. And big ones at that.
The Livingston, Florida grandmother recently killed a 12-foot alligator on her ranch.
Cochran, who is the town’s mayor, took aim at the gator because she believed that the alligator is responsible for the disappearance for her mini horse.
“The horse just disappeared, so we’re thinking the gator got it,” Cochran told FOX 13.
The chance to nab her horse’s assailant came when she found a raccoon carcass on her property.
Her son-in-law helped her to hang it on a hook above the water.
She would use the raccoon to lure the alligator out of the water. She was in a meeting when she heard that the gator was caught.
“When Scott called, he said, we’ve got the big one, Nana, so come on down,” said Cochran.
When she arrived back home, she shot the gator with her Winchester .22 Magnum. The alligator was 12-feet long and weighed 580-pounds.
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Cochran says she’s been trying to catch the gator every hunting season but there isn’t a lot of time to get that job done.
“Polk County is one of 12 core counties that you can only kill a gator between September the 10th and September the 30th—only that 20 days,” Cochran said.
It’s not unusual to see such a large alligator on Cochran’s property.
Her grandson, Simon Hughes, killed a 5-year-old 12-foot 6-inch male alligator that weighed 800 pounds.
But Cochran has received quite the backlash since avenging her mini-horse and her story went viral.
“There are all these negative comments at me personally,” Cochran told New York Times.
Cochran said she received at least a dozen calls are her home and office, some of which were “vicious and even threatening.”
Many complained that she shouldn’t have killed the alligator.
They say she should have relocated one. One person even started a petition to impeach her. Livingston City Hall has been flooded with phone calls complaining about Cochran.
The comments online are also getting pretty cruel. Cochran decided to just stop talking about shooting the gator out of respect for her office.
“I’m tough,” Cochran said. “I can handle it.”
Cochran still defends herself by saying she had a permit from the state to shoot the alligator and shot it during the proper hunting season.
She even has a state wildlife biologist survey her ranch before she got her permit as the law requires. She says she is glad she killed the gator that killed her mini horse.
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