A South Carolina mother of two, Brittany Livingston, killed a 12-foot alligator during a family hunt just five months after giving birth and plans to turn it into a full-body rug.
According to the New York Post, Brittany earned the nickname “Gator Girl” after videos surfaced of her family driving through a McDonald’s with the massive alligator carcass in the back of their truck.
Brittany and her husband, Matt Livingston, had been planning the hunt on and off for the last five years. In South Carolina, alligator hunting tags are awarded through a seasonal lottery, which sees more than 12,000 applicants competing for roughly 1,400 available tags.
“This year, we finally got called and weren’t going to let the opportunity go to waste,” Brittany said, noting that gator hunting isn’t exactly “something most people do on maternity leave.”
The couple secured the 12-foot, 597-pound alligator, affectionately named “Chomp Norris,” after hours of hunting through the marshlands in September.
The Livingstons emphasized that they would make full use of the alligator to teach their children about respecting wildlife. “We wouldn’t hunt anything if we weren’t going to eat it. We respect the wildlife just as much, and we want it to still be here for our kids,” Matt said.
The couple plans to turn the alligator into a full-body rug and harvest the meat to make gator sausages and snack sticks. They dropped the carcass off at a family business that processes wild game, which produced more than 100 pounds of preserved meat products.
Alligator hunting season in South Carolina runs from September to October, and during the most recent season, hunters harvested only 438 alligators out of an estimated 100,000 statewide.
