that cool boy right there that big fella what's going on guys just finished up my tours this morning had uh three people in here doing uh my underwater gator tour hanging out with casper a little bit all right big fella look how cute he is huh oh look he's got his he's got his hand up on my arm here you hanging out big guy now uh just because i guess i haven't talked about this in a while i've been working with casper for about 13 years now and as you can see he's very very well trained very very smart and we've been doing the underwater gator tour together for about five or six years now and so he understands the tour knows what to do who knows what his job is and then he gets rewarded for it i'm gonna give him a treat right now actually so if i move over here and call him over casper come you see him turn right around there come get me good boy there we go and lunge that down there you go big fella i hear him doing a little bit of a kind of like a little purr right there pretty cool and go big fella but uh but anyways so yeah i've been working with him for about uh it's going on like 13 years now and he's very very well trained but i do like to point out that he's trained not tame and you know a lot of people see uh little clips and such in my videos where i'm interacting with him people like oh look he's tame he doesn't bite you know um so i just like to always clarify that he is a real alligator he does bite now he's never bit me or anybody in my tour but um you know if i were to do something foolish like if i were to like slap my hand against his face or something like that uh or anything that made him feel threatened or anything that made him feel like i was no longer me and that i was uh like pray in some way like he's literally sitting up on my chest right here um but if i were to do something like like if i was just laying in here and just like like look like i was dead you know he'd come over he would investigate he'd probably nudge me a little bit and take a little bite see if i react if i didn't then he'd eat me right um so you know he is a real alligator he's not a dog you know that's what i always try to point out is she's an alligator not a labrador you know um these guys do have all their wild instincts and that he was caught out of the wild as a nuisance gator maybe like six inches shorter than he is right now so he is not raised in captivity i didn't raise him from a baby that's one of the most common things people think is oh you must have just raised them or people like oh we must have just fed him before the tours that's not true either we don't feed him before the tours and even if we did it wouldn't make any difference and then a lot of people like well if you feed him enough food he'll get full and he won't attack you right wrong that's not how these guys work you know for one uh they don't have much of an idea of being full i've literally watched an alligator eat so much food that he throws it up and then eats it back over again beautiful smell right there right so yeah that is uh that is the thing i have seen before with these guys so they don't exactly get full and then also if i was feeding him to make him so full every time he would be obese okay because we only feed these guys about once a week and that's another big one too a lot of people don't understand is that crocodilians they don't produce their own body heat and so because of this they have very low metabolic requirements and so they don't have to eat very much we only feed them like once a week a 250 pound alligator like him is gonna eat less than a year than like a 30 pound dog and so because of this if i fed him a bunch of food to make him full before every interaction he would have died of like heart disease like years ago okay it doesn't make any sense it's not possible to be able to do that okay and he would again he would be morbidly obese and obesity is a thing in crocodilians uh you'll see this at a lot of zoo sometimes where they don't understand that they do you have to uh you know be careful about how much food that you're feeding them you can't overfeed them and a lot of places do that and then they have over fed obese alligators or crocodiles it's actually pretty darn common i'm grabbing this thing because it keeps on like pushing up against my neck right here but um anyways though yeah you don't want to overfeed them you know because again they do get they do get overweight and that causes health complications and that's going to shorten his lifespan but uh but anyways so what is he actually that he does and why is he so chill is he special in any way no um it is literally just a consequence of training of working with him and you know proper training that's what it really comes down to is getting him to understand how this works that he doesn't have to be afraid of me and that when he does what i want him to do that he gets rewarded he gets treats okay and that's that is the only reason and then you know i get a lot of people like oh we must be drugged or sedated no i mean for one that is unethical we would never do that anyways but for two you can't do it anyways uh for a couple different reasons for one these guys are a conscious breather every breath he takes is a conscious decision and uh so what that means is if he is unconscious then he's not gonna breathe on his own just like you're you're crap i might have just said that backwards i don't know if i just i might just call myself the point is these guys are conscious breathers we are unconscious breathers so we breathe without thinking about it and we continue to breathe when we are unconscious like if you're put under you continue to breathe he does not so we have to take one of them to the vet we actually have to intubate them you got to put a tube down the throat the breeze for them artificially because upon sedation like that he's going to stop breathing and then he can die right so that's why we have to intubate them to do that um and that's important for them when they're in the water like this because you know as an animal that uh gets in fights and whatnot if he gets to fight another alligator and he got knocked knocked unconscious and then he automatically started breathing underwater he would drown which is exactly what happens to people that's why shallow water block out such a scary thing if you're a free diver because if you black out underwater your body automatically starts breathing underwater and then you die all right you drown so for crocodilians it's actually pretty beneficial to not have that uh that unconscious breathing thing i'm twisting my words up here i'm sorry guys but you get you get the idea i'm trying to make there so um but anyways that so we do not uh sedate them or anything like that in any way and the way that he acts is just again just because of the training which is such a hard thing for a lot of people to understand they just they just don't believe it or they don't want to believe it or think there's some sort of trick behind it there's no trick i have trained uh at least 20 alligators over the years to know their name come when they're called and to be chill and be able to be handleable kind of like how casper is here now casper is my most well-trained alligator that i work with but you know i have trained a lot of them