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Officer serving eviction notice is confronted by pet 7-foot alligator

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Officers serving eviction notices are used to seeing all sorts of things, but 7-foot alligators are not one of them. Animal experts had to be called in to remove one resident's unique pet.

"I've had him since he was itty bitty and he's my pet. He's my little buddy," Sean Casey told KSHB. "Sometimes he gets kind of smelly. But he's a big cuddly gator. He wags his tail when I come home."

Today, Casey's beloved pet alligator of four years, named Katfish, is in the custody of Animal Control. A Jackson County sheriff deputy called them after encountering the large gator while executing an eviction notice at Casey's childhood home.

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"In my 15 years of doing this, I've encountered -- this is my second or third alligator call -- but this is the first one of this magnitude of size," said Animal Control Investigator James Donovan. Animal Control called on Dana Savorelli from Monkey Island Rescue to help.

Savorelli says he found Katfish in a pool inside the house. "With the water that was maybe 18 inches deep. But he could get up and go out and cruise through the house. He had a ramp," said Savorelli.

Casey says Katfish's diet of chicken nuggets, steak, deer, fish and rats got him to his current weight of more than 200 pounds.

It took four officers to haul them out of the house. "We just wrapped him up in a blanket just so we could get him out easier and he wasn't banging into stuff as much. It was a little easier for us to carry, but two of us couldn't pick him up," said Savorelli.

Animal Control also took into custody three pythons and a rabbit. "He can reclaim the snakes and the rabbit, but the alligator is a prohibited animal here in Kansas City, Missouri. So he will not be allowed to retrieve that animal," said Donovan.

"He's not a ferocious animal like people want to make him out to be. Anybody who's ever met him would know," said Casey.

Authorities will give Casey a ticket for possessing an illegal animal in the city limits.