$10 wins turtle’s freedom

“I reached down there with the other hand to get my finger back and he got my thumb,” Wilder said.

Ouch!

$10 wins turtle’s freedom

(Michael E. Palmer/Tuscaloosa News) Stephen Glasgow of Riverview Animal Clinic releases an alligator snapping turtle into the Black Warrior River on Wednesday. Below is a close-up of the 70-pound turtle.
By Wayne Grayson Staff Writer
Published: Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 11:51 p.m.
He had already lost $10, he wasn’t about to lose his finger too.

But as William Wilder reached down to retrieve most of his left index finger from the clutches of a 70-pound alligator snapping turtle, the turtle struck again.

“I reached down there with the other hand to get my finger back and he got my thumb,” Wilder said.

The turtle was a bit out of sorts, and likely terrified as Wilder hosed him down on the front porch of his home in Brookwood. But it was a far better situation than what could have been had Wilder not come to the turtle’s rescue earlier in the day.

Wilder had just gotten off work and decided to head down to a nearby bar to meet a few friends. Walking in, he noticed the turtle confined in the bed of a pickup truck. A cable had been attached to the truck bed and run through a small hole drilled into the turtle’s shell.

He asked around the bar to see who the truck belonged to and what they planned on doing with the turtle. The man who owned the truck told him he caught the turtle while fishing.

“He said the turtle had gotten stuck in his trotline and they were gonna take him home and eat him,” Wilder said.

And while Wilder will be the first to admit he’s no animal expert, he knew by the turtle’s sheer size that it had to be rare.

“I said ‘No you ain’t. How about I give you $10 and take it off your hands,’” Wilder said. “I wasn’t about to let anybody kill something like that.”

And later on the front porch, as the turtle tightened its grip on Wilder’s hand, and those looking on urged him to kill the behemoth reptile, Wilder stayed true to his misunderstood friend.

“I said I just got done paying 10 dollars for this thing,” Wilder said. “Nobody’s going to kill it. Especially not me.”

It took four EMTs to pull the turtle from Wilder’s hand. He spent two days in the hospital and while he still has his right thumb, doctors weren’t able to reattach the finger.

When he returned home, the turtle greeted him, still sitting on the front porch. He soon called the Alabama Wildlife Center to, once and for all, take the turtle off his hands.

The turtle was treated at Riverview Animal Clinic in Birmingham for head and tail injuries and Wednesday afternoon, the animal was released back into the wild.

Lee McDonald of the AWC said alligator snapping turtles aren’t endangered, but they are a threatened species and are protected by state law from being captured or killed. McDonald said the turtles eat anything they can catch and are thought to deplete fish populations.

She said it is common for the turtle to become tangled in trotlines and then killed by fishermen once they are dragged to shore.

“It’s important that we’re getting him back where he needs to be,” McDonald said.

Wilder has no hard feelings toward his attacker and was glad to hear the turtle had finally made it home.

“That’s just the way I feel about animals. I just want to make sure nothing happens to them,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting that to happen, but it happened.”

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/articl...rtle-s-freedom

Nice story. The guy went above and beyond the call.

Yeah...WAY above. Cost him a finger.

Originally Posted by RyanT

Yeah...WAY above. Cost him a finger.

A finger, $10 bucks, and dinners for a week!

Good dude, though, I hope karma's keeping tabs.