Despite a beloved teacher’s tragic death, alligators belong on Hilton Head Island

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Alligators don’t kill people on Hilton Head Island. Or so we thought, until this week. A 45-year-old woman died after an alligator pulled her and her dog into a lagoon in Sea Pines Monday morning.

The whole world, it seems, was stunned and saddened. I was among them.

It’s personal for home folks. We know dogs. We know lagoons. We know gators. We all live closely together. We know nice neighbors who have a lot to offer the world, like this celebrated kindergarten teacher who tried to save her dog, and did.

And we know that one of the reactions has been a push to get rid of the alligators.

That’s wrong.

Alligators belong in the Lowcountry.

They are considered a “keystone species” on Hilton Head, which means they provide critical natural services that support the island ecosystem, the town says.

They are part of the experience of living in the Lowcountry that has become so popular.

We have seen alligators get on porches and appear to ring the doorbell. We have known them to show up in swimming pools, in parking lots, at schools, on golf course fairways and even the church door. We have witnessed endless fascination with alligators by visitors and residents alike.

And we know that it’s doubtful the gators — even the largest ones — could be wiped out, even if we tried.

For many years after people started digging lagoons for new homes and golf courses in the alligators’ murky lair, it was illegal to kill them. That can be done today only under stiff regulation.

State wildlife officers used to come to gather up the big ones or ones considered a nuisance and haul them off, way up the coastline. They tagged them, and because of those tags, we knew that the same gators would come back to Hilton Head, crossing many miles.

Meanwhile, alligators became imprinted in our culture. They have been school mascots. Our youth football teams are the Gators. Friendly gators regularly graced our newspaper’s early editorial cartoons. They sort of symbolized exotic lives in an exotic place.

But alligators are not cute. They’re not friendly. And the older I get, the less I like them. We learned this week how deadly they can be.

Maybe we’re so used to living around them that we have forgotten that they are big, powerful predators.

We’ve spent forever trying to teach people not to feed alligators.

Now, through sadness and anger, we realize that alligators are dangerous to a degree we’ve never imagined.

We can know that.

We can steer clear of them.

But we should not try to get rid of them.

This story was originally published August 22, 2018 at 2:25 PM with the headline "Despite a beloved teacher’s tragic death, alligators belong on Hilton Head Island."