Exaggerated or false news about New Orleans is everywhere, including patently false reports of cannibalism, and a host of other things -- including innumerable reports of attacks and feasting on humans by alligators.

I've always been partial to alligators, having owned several, one of which I kept in my bathtub for years. While there's no question that they can seriously hurt you (especially if you tempt fate by feeding them or attempting to rescue a seized pet) for the most part they're inoffensive beasts. They'll leave you alone if you leave them alone.

OK, now that I've disclosed what might be gator sympathy (if not pro-gator bias) on my part, I'll try to address some of the gator rumors as fairly as I can.

I keep reading about gators feasting on people, and I'm very skeptical -- especially of stories like this:

A National Guard soldier said he saw an alligator jump out of the water on a residential street and bite a man's leg off. He said sharks were swimming around some houses.

Most of Katrina's victims are poor and black, unable to evacuate the area as the storm raced in, and the tragedy has highlighted the vast racial divide in the United States.

Feeding Habits and Patterns Who do they eat?

Alligators swallow their food whole without chewing it. Their strong digestive fluids allow them to digest turtle shells and bone. If an animal is too large to swallow, the alligator will let it rot a week. The alligator lacks the capability of many predators to tear flesh off a carcass or to chew. Alligator teeth are made for grabbing and holding, not for cutting and chewing. Alligators swallow their food whole. If the prey cannot be swallowed whole, the flesh has deteriorate almost to the point where it almost falls of the bone before the alligator can devour it. When dealing with larger prey, an alligator may shake its head in order to tear off a piece small enough to swallow.

Then there's this -- from the Urban Legends web site:

"Sharks and alligators are eating people in downtown New Orleans."

Then there's the famous Steve Gilliard quote:

Well, motherfuckers, the alligators are feasting on dead nigger and there isn't an Iraqi in sight.

Alligators were eating people. They had all kind of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water. We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old folks' homes. I tried to get the police to help us but I realized we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the district police station. The boat, the guy who was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to get to places where they could be saved. We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them, but they never would stop and help us.

I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so that we could steal and loot and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. And it came to a point where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to get the helicopters. They thought maybe if they heard the gunfire, they would stop then. But that didn't help us. No one helped us."

It's very unlikely that alligators would be eating humans in New Orleans.

For starters, we simply are not what they eat:

Alligators, unlike crocodiles, do not see humans as a food source. If you want to see alligators, you have to be very quiet and paddle softly. In Louisiana, alligator attacks on humans in the water are nearly non-existent. We have kayaked the Louisiana swamps for over 7 years and have never had any problem or felt threatened by an alligator.

Certainly, it is possible that dead bodies have eaten by alligators, but I haven't seen confirmation in the form of a single substantiated story. A nameless guardsman is not a reliable source, and I'd need to hear more details from Charmaine Neville before I'd consider her story hard evidence. If she'd really seen this happening, why didn't she say so specifically? Was she reciting secondhand information? She sounded extremely (and understandably) distraught, and it's possible she saw an alligator or two in the water.

I'm not saying it isn't possible that a corpse might be eaten by an occasional scavenging alligator. But people are not normally their diet, and I just don't think alligators stressed by a hurricane are likely to appear in large numbers in a residential area in highly polluted water. I think the stories are being hyped.

And I think it will continue to be hyped, because people love this stuff. And few will defend the lowly gator.

I will, because I think they're wonderful creatures.

I know that a lot of people think alligators are creepy and awful and therefore don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. But I'd just like something more in the way of proof than second hand reports, or statements like "we'll never find the thousands of missing people because the alligators ate them all!"

Even people who hate gators ought to welcome a chance to really get the goods on them.

UPDATE: The blame-the-alligator meme seems increasingly likely because of frustrations involving numbers:

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept 8 - Estimates of the death toll from Hurricane Katrina have run as high as 10,000 but the actual body count so far is much lower and officials who feared the worst now hope the dire predictions were wrong.

The recovery of Katrina's victims speeded up in the last two days. As of Thursday, Mississippi had recorded 201 deaths and Louisiana 118, while other affected states had much lower numbers.

...
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, taking the lead in the recovery, has brought 25,000 body bags to the Gulf region. A morgue in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, is capable of processing 140 corpses a day and officials have formed a plan to handle in excess of 5,000 bodies.

....

In the rural areas east of St. Bernard Parish, some bodies will never be found because alligators will have taken them away, locals said.