Labor Day weekend was a bad one for alligators in the state of Mississippi.
An amateur hunter killed a gargantuan 727-pound gator with a crossbow on Saturday, breaking the state record. Amazingly, Dustin Bockman became the second hunter to set a new state record within hours when he bagged the massive creature on the Mississippi River.
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"He broke all the lines we could put in him," Bockman told MS News Now. "Finally put a snare on him and got him up high enough and put a shot on him. All in all probably took us four and a half hours to catch him from the first time we saw him."
When the group couldn't get the 13-foot creature on the boat, they decided to mount its head on a sandbar.
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“We pulled his head up on the bank far enough he wouldn’t float away,” Bockman told the Hattiesburg American. “He was so heavy he wasn’t going anywhere.”
Bockman's feat came shortly after Beth Trammell and her group became the first hunters in the state to break the 700-pound barrier with a 723.5-pound catch. The previous record had been 697.5.
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The Mississippi Alligator program coordinator confirmed both records.
“When we first saw him, I yelled 'oh my gosh we caught the Loch Ness Monster!’” Trammell told ABC News. "It was totally unbelievable."
It was a bad weekend for smaller alligators too. A pair of hunters reportedly bagged a record 295-pound female gator.
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