Stupid Pet Trick of the Week: Wally the Watchgator?

​There's no Orange County angle here, but this story is simply too 909, er, funny to not pass along. On Monday, a Riverside County drug task force raided a suspected pot farm in Hemet. No, the fact they actually have time to do go after marijuana cases with all the meth labs out there isn't the weird part.

Nope, the weird part is that the pot farm was being guarded by "Wally," a 4-foot-long, 55-pound alligator.

A 29-year-old suspect was arrested at the house for felony possession of concentrated cannabis and cultivation of marijuana for sale, and Wally was sent off to an exotic-animal shelter in the nearby town of Phelan, reported Village Voice Media's national medical-marijuana blog. You can read that story here.

Okay, so a 4-foot alligator doesn't exactly sound that menacing, although technically, they can move pretty fast, at least for short distances. But even though the publicity-hungry narcs are calling their catch a "Watchgator," they actually found the beast in a "black cement-mixing tub" inside the house where the farm was located, raising the question of whether Wally was really just an innocent bystander, or what most people would refer to as a "pet alligator" rather than some pimped-out wannabe drug kingpin's idea of pot protection.