Tracking Wild Tales

One of the staples of the Internet these days are wild animal stories, often buttressed with pictures. The pictures are often real, but the stories themselves are often corrupted to give a sense of immediacy or nearness to something rare that occurred far away. A couple of examples:

Azur Hotel Alligator, New Orleans: The email, sent to me by an office mate, said the photos showed an alligator found swimming down the street in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (this email was received while dogs were still being recovered from boats in New Orleans). The alligator was supposedly 21 feet long, and weighed 4,500 lbs, and was killed by the army national guard "last Sunday at 3:00 pm," and he was "currently in the freezer at the Azur hotel." A great story, but a quick inspection of the picture showed it to be a crocodile, not an alligator. Crocs largely come from Africa, and the skin color of the onlookers suggested this one did too. A minute of research and I found the true story -- a 50-year old Nile Croc, about 16 feet long and weighing 1,874 pounds that was shot in the Congo. The picture of the croc was taken on the beach in front of the Petroleum club, Plage Sportive In Pointe Noire, Congo, and the Hotel Azur is nearby.




Australian Sheep-eating Snake: The email, sent to me by an office mate, said the photos showed a sheep-eating snake found dead on an electric fence in New South Wales Australia. Not likely.   Though there are a fair number of poisonous snakes in Australia, and a few decent long ones, none are the size of this monster. I guessed that the snake was an African Rock Python, and I was right. The snake was found dead on the Silent Valley Game Ranch in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. It had eaten an adult female impala, which made its body too fat to squeeze under the electric fence without touching it. The game farm, by the way, has a few Jack Russells!




To be clear, these kind of emails are not "accidents" -- they are intentional hoaxes of the same kind that your right-wing friends send you which always turn up over at "Snopes" with the word FALSE hanging all over them.  In fact, have any of my conservative friends ever forwarded me an email that turned out to  be true?  Not yet!
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