Mother on maternity leave nabs 12-foot alligator that her family plans to turn into a rug
Brittany and Matt Livingston hunted and killed a hulking 12-foot alligator in South Carolina. Cordray's / Facebook
A South Carolina mother of two recently made headlines after killing a 12-foot alligator on a family hunting trip during the final weeks of her maternity leave, with plans to turn the massive creature into a full-body rug.
Brittany Livingston, who welcomed her second child just five months ago, has earned the nickname “Gator Girl” after videos surfaced of her family driving through a McDonald’s drive-thru with the enormous alligator in the back of their truck. “We had a lot of eyes on us. People were waving, giving thumbs up … even the workers at McDonald’s came outside to see it,” Brittany told WCSC.
Brittany and her husband, Matt Livingston, had been planning this hunt on and off for the past five years. In South Carolina, alligator hunting tags are distributed through a seasonal lottery managed by the state Department of Natural Resources, with over 12,000 applicants competing for just 1,400 tags each year.
After years of denials, Brittany was finally awarded a tag and wasn’t about to miss the opportunity, even joking that gator hunting isn’t exactly a typical maternity leave activity.
The couple successfully captured the 12-foot, 597-pound alligator, affectionately named “Chomp Norris,” after hours of challenging hunting through the marshlands in September.
The Livingstons emphasized that they plan to make use of the entire alligator, teaching their children the value of respecting and honoring nature. Their 3-year-old son even mistook the creature for a “dinosaur.” “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.
Plans for the alligator include crafting a full-body rug and preparing gator meat for sausages and snack sticks. The carcass was dropped off at a family-run business specializing in wild game processing, where workers were able to turn it into over 100 pounds of preserved meat products.
Alligator hunting season in South Carolina runs from September to October, and during the most recent season, only 438 alligators were harvested out of an estimated population of 100,000 in the state.
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