Rangers finally catch up with the 17-foot Terror of Long Patau.
“When it swallows the bait, it also swallows the hardwood,” Mohamad Suffian explained. “It wouldn’t be easy for a crocodile to free itself from the hook and hardwood stuck in its throat.”
LAHAD DATU: Villagers who live on the banks of the Long Patau can now breathe their sigh of relief. The giant crocodile that terrorised them for more than five years is finally dead.
Wildlife rangers said they had no choice but to shoot it when they saw that it might succeed as it struggled to escape the hook that caught it.
It measured 17 feet long and the Wildlife Department believes it was responsible for at least three deaths and more than a dozen cases of serious injuries. The dead include a plantation worker and two policemen attached to Felda’s Sahabat 24 resettlement scheme.
“Only parts of the plantation worker were found,” said Mohamad Suffian Abu Bakar, who heads the the Wildlife Department here. “The two policemen remain missing.”
The first attack happened in 2005. For years, rangers tried various means of trapping the crocodile, but principally by using meat as bait on a hook or in a 2ft by 2ft by 14 ft cage floated on the river. That was before they knew how big it was.
“For so long, we thought this was a smart reptile that refused to enter our trap,” said Mohamad Suffian. “But recently, we spotted it sunbathing on the river bank. It was then that we realised it was too big to crawl into our cage.”
The department then decided to the use the traditional method of crocodile trapping, which involves tying a long piece of hardwood to a hook.
“When it swallows the bait, it also swallows the hardwood,” Mohamad Suffian explained. “It wouldn’t be easy for a crocodile to free itself from the hook and hardwood stuck in its throat.”That was the method that finally did in the Terror of Long Patau.
Meanwhile, the State Wildlife Department has advised the public to reduce their activities in rivers and ponds where crocodiles have been sighted.
The department’s deputy director, Augustine Tuga, said crocodiles would normally hunt in the afternoon and evening.
He said crocodiles were turning to humans as food because they had lost much of their natural prey with the clearing of forests for agriculture.
He also said his department recently started tracking crocodile movements by satellite.
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