"If kids are not accompanied by adults here, it leaves the rest of us to feel we have to watch out for those kids and that isn't our job anymore. It is one of the reasons I moved here so I don't have to worry about kids and watch them unattended do dangerous things."
"Just remember an Alligator can come out of the water to within one foot of his or hers tail.
So an 8 foot Alligator can come straight up to within 7 foot. The action is like of a fish, up... then back down."
These are two key points on why I started this thread. More and more, we see very young kids left to their own devices. I was taking pictures of the lighthouse and down toward the hotel that night on the boardwalk in front of the radio station. When I looked at the pictures after I made the first post, I looked at my pictures to verify what a couple of posters here were pooh-poohing as an over-reaction on my part.
The little girl looks like she's about 8 years old and the boys she was with looked 10-12 years old. There was no adult in sight besides me. I really feared for them, jostling around on the rope fence with their camera phones, and reaching down and leaning down toward the water to see if the gator would surface again where I'd just seen him go under.
When the little girl told me "Oh....it's a mechanical gator anyway, people told us", I told her to be really, really careful because there are live, giant ones that can come up and bite at something like a hand etc. She and the other kids were being kids and weren't listening too closely (remember kids are taught "not to talk to strangers").
It's really aggravating to have to watch other people's kids after doing that for decades with our own. But some parents couldn't care less. And then they would be FURIOUS if we had called the police or community watch because they're behaving dangerously and we would have called only because we
CARED. The only reason I didn't call authorities to warn them is because they finally started slowly moving away from the ropes, toward the steps up to the sidewalk.