Escape and One Eyed John

Dr. Jennifer Fortune shares two stories on Tales from the Dogside. In the first story, she recounts a chilling encounter while cycling on a remote road with a suspicious black pickup truck tailing her, leading to a police roadblock for a bank robbery. The second story involves a biopsy on a famous giant alligator named One-Eyed John at a ranger camp, where attempts to confine him hilariously fail, showcasing the challenges of dealing with apex predators. Hello, welcome to Tales from the Dogside. I'm Dr. Jennifer Fortune, I'm a veterinarian in Nice, South Florida. I've practiced for 40 years on almost every animal imaginable. For living in a small town, I've had adventures that should be shared. I'm going to share some of my life experiences with you, people, animals, and sometimes a combination. First, I'm going to do two short stories, both of them loosely related. They took place on the same road, and they both involved major apex predators. The first one I'm going to call escape. There was a time in my life where I had a lot of issues, I had a son that died recently, and so I was a big cyclist, that was my escape from the things that happen when you lose a child. I would get on my bicycle and just pedal away, sometimes as much as 100 miles a day. In my lunch hour, I would go about 12 miles. This was a great way for me to just get away from it all and get in another headspace. One day, early in the morning, I thought I'd go cycling. There's a road in our area called Range Road. This road is about 20 to 30 miles long. It's one way. It's a paved road, very straight. The environment around it is very open. It's on a military base. At the end of this road is the ranger camp, and there's almost never any traffic on this road. It's a very, very generally safe place to get on your bicycle and just go. We have a group that would meet once a week, but on this day, it was a weekend, and I decided I would go by myself. It was early in the morning. It was a drizzly day. We cyclists don't mind that stuff. I put on my headsets, my headphones, and my helmet and started cycling. I was probably three or four miles into this little trip, and I still had like 20 to go. There was a black pickup truck with blacked-out windows that came past me. This would happen occasionally. You'd think it would be one of the rangers that had gone to run errands and was coming back to where their home base was, but up a bit away, maybe a quarter mile, the truck turned around, and it came back towards me, and then as it slowed down, it wasn't slowing down to be careful. I got the feeling that it was slowing down to look at me closer. I couldn't see who was in it. The windows were blacked-out. It just was odd, but being a veterinarian, we have to assess lots of behavior patterns, not just our animals. You know, fear in a dog often translates to aggression. Humans make their dogs people, and the owners very often will have extreme anxiety, so I have to assess both the humans and the dogs and whatever animals. Sometimes it's a little rabbit that causes extreme anxiety on the owner's part, so we veterinarians spend all day reading behavior patterns, so this was a very uncommon way this truck was interacting with me, so it went very slowly past me, and then it got a little bit, and then sped up, went out of sight. I'm just keeping cycling on down towards the ranger camp. I didn't think too much about it, but then here it came again. As it got close to me, it slowed down, and at this point, I was starting to feel like I was in dark water, and there was a shark circling. It just did not feel right, so I'm looking at my situation, and I don't have any weaponry. I have a bicycle. That's it. This person has a truck, a big one, and it looks like there was things going on in his mind that were no good intentions towards me, so I looked at the environment around me. It's very barren out here. It's a little short trees, nothing to climb on, no place to hide. I had on bike shoes, so even if I ditched the bike and ran, I'm assuming this was probably a man in this truck. He would be able to run me down quite quickly. Then no weaponry. There's nothing at all, so what do you do in a time like this? I thought, well, my best protection is to run, not by foot, but on my bicycle. I said, this guy is going to have to run me over on the road. If he has the intent of doing something to me, I want to be so badly beat up that he's not going to want to bother, so when he turned around again, I could see him way down in the distance. I just switched my bike around and turned towards the opening of where I'd started, which was probably about three or four miles away. I put my head down, pedaled to the metal, and I started to fly. I did not look back. I just went as fast as I could. I've been in a triathlon, so I am not a weak cyclist. I just, in my mind, pretended I was a bird running away from an eagle, and I had to do the best I could. I just pedaled as fast as I could. I could see up ahead that the entrance was coming around a curve, and when I got there, there was a multitude of police cars, lights, a roadblock. I'm like, uh-oh, you know, this must have been a bad accident, so I got to safety. I looked back. At that point, the first time I looked back, and I didn't see the truck, and the policeman said, where did you come from? I said, well, I was down the road, and he goes, did you see a black truck? I go, yeah. It went by me like four times, I think, at least, and he said, well, they robbed a bank, and we've got a roadblock. We're going to catch them, because there's no place to go, so here, come on. You need to just get on your way. We got this from here. Well, I was very, very happy to see the police, and they eventually caught the guy, and I didn't hear any more about that, but I'm sure that he got probably, or maybe not. Who knows these days, but I thought about how we assess the situations and sometimes don't make good decisions, and sometimes we just make the best decisions we have, but I truly felt in that moment that this guy wanted to kidnap me and use me as a hostage, but I was going so fast that I could have whipped around him if he pulled away in front of me, or he would have to kidnap run me on the bicycle, and I was going to make him the crash into me. Maybe not a good option, but it worked in that situation, so that was my top, my dealing with probably the top predator in the world, which is human. Now, my second story is called One-Eyed John. Now, this is another top predator story. It happened on this exact same road, so I got a call from the, whoever the person was out at the ranger camp, and she said, listen, we got a problem with One-Eyed John, and we need you to come out and do a biopsy. Now, One-Eyed John, I was familiar with One-Eyed John. One-Eyed John's kind of famous around these parts. He was the biggest alligator in the world. I don't exactly remember his stats, but he was, I believe, around 15 to 16 feet long and around 2,000 pounds. He was kind of the mascot of the ranger camp. They had captured him. He was in captivity a super long time. They had a big pen for him and a pool out there. I actually, sometimes they would, you could see him at an exhibition, so I'd actually seen him before, and he'd lost an eye at some point in his life. I think they estimated his life to be somewhere around 75, 80 years old, and so that was his name, One-Eyed John. I go, what's up with One-Eyed John? They said, well, he's got some skin issue going on, and it's not looking good. We need a biopsy. I said, do you want me to take a biopsy for One-Eyed John? They go, yeah. I said, well, as long as you guys can confine him so I can safely do this, I will. I said, I've got a meeting in Fort Walton. I'll be going right past there. You guys kind of get him tied up where he can't hurt anybody, and I will come by and get a skin biopsy. I went down, drove the 20 miles, and thought about this previous incident with the man that was going to take me hostage, and so now I'm dealing with this giant alligator. I got up to the ranger camp, and there's the cage he's in. It's actually a quite large pen, maybe 50 by 50, with a pool in it, with a sloping one side so he could go in, and the other side was a short concrete wall, maybe four feet. He's sunning himself, and he's not confined by any stretch of the imagination. I said, well, I'm here. I was going to a business meeting, so I had a short skirt on and dress shoes, not high heels, but dress shoes. I thought this alligator was going to be somehow confined, because I know they had loaded him up into things before, but no. He was in. I thought, what am I supposed to do? I said, well, see if you can sneak up on him and take a sample. I said, you guys are joking. This is a giant alligator. I can't outrun him. They can run up to 35 miles an hour. One guy said, he's pretty slow. See if you can do it. I've never been really afraid of much of anything, so I got out there in his cage with him, and he was sunning himself. I thought maybe I could sneak up on him, but as soon as he saw me, he started to try and chase me. Now, I'm booking it around this cage, it's big, I could run. Fortunately, he was obese, and he was slower than me, because he really hadn't had exercise in quite some time. By then, 20 or 30 rangers had gathered to watch the show, and they were cheering for the alligator. I'm like, what the heck is wrong? Go, John, go. I don't know what they would have thought if he could actually catch me, but I think they probably knew that he was too slow and too fat to actually run me down. I said, listen, guys, it's not going to work, and you're going to have to do better about confining him. Some guy went out there with a German Shepherd catch pole, which is kind of a snare, and I started laughing. I go, you guys got to be joking. You think that's going to hold this guy? No, no, we can do this. I said, all right, I'm going to wait outside and see how this goes down. One of their brave guys got out and walked on the wall and got kind of in front of where he was and put this catch pole around his snout, and John promptly, and it has a long pole attached to it, maybe four feet, made out of metal, and John twirled his head and flung that off like a shot put, and it went, I don't know, over the fence and maybe 30 feet and on the other side. Everybody of course started laughing. I said, all right, that's not going to work. Now, let's get a regular rope around his neck and then a regular rope around his tail, and then you guys, I got 30 of you, you're going to pull him towards the fence, and then I've got his whole body kind of smug up against that because the tail is as dangerous as the mouth. The man that was helping us, one of the rangers, managed to get a rope around his neck, and they pulled, 20 guys, pulled this giant alligator up next to the fence, and then we got a rope around his tail, and another 10 guys pulled him up against the fence, and so I still had my helper. I said, listen, you're going to help me get this. They picked the worst place, so we went over next to him, and he's thrashing around, but ineffectively, and I pointed to the spot I needed, let me show you where to get it. We got a sample, put it in the formalin, and I left at that point, and we let him go, and everybody cheered. He'd been trying to save it, it looked pretty bad, so we sent the biopsy off, and he came back as a sunburn. Poor John, they'd let the water in his tank get too low, and the chemicals they used to keep the water a little bit cleaner were more concentrated on his back, and the sun kind of irritated it. So John had a sunburn, and a low-grade chemical burn. We filled up his tank, and re-acclimated the chemicals to it, so it wasn't dangerous, and he lived quite a few more years. Now, you can still see one-eyed John, he's died, but the rangers loved him so much, they stuffed him, and he is still, you know, if we have a local charity event, or the rangers have a booth somewhere, they will haul stuffed one-eyed John down to, so the kids can see this giant, giant alligator, and touch, and see how big these guys actually get. So, these are the two stories of my escape on Range Road, and my one-eyed John alligator interaction on Range Road. So, the two, one of the two top predators in the world, I managed to come out unscathed with both of them, and I consider myself very lucky. I hope you enjoy this podcast. If you do, please take the time to leave me a note, if you like it, if it's too long, if it's boring, you know, I'll try and adjust if I can, but I'm really just telling you these stories as they come to me, and they're not TikToks. These are actually stories of events that happened, and kind of the things around them, and I enjoy them, and I, my clients enjoy them, and I hope you enjoy them, too.