Claude wasn’t much of a talker, he barely moved, and never wore a costume to entice his audience – but on Sunday, hundreds gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the life and legacy of the city’s beloved albino alligator.<\/p>\n
A New Orleans-style brass band, a gator-shaped eight-foot-long white sourdough bread, drag queen story time and even a street officially bearing his name, Claude the Alligator Way, the memorial was one of its kind.<\/p>\n
The reptile sure won millions of hearts when he was alive, but he was also remembered for stealing from a 12-year-old girl. <\/p>\n
The 10-foot-long, 300-pound white alligator with pink eyes and poor eyesight once stole – and then gobbled- the girl’s ballet shoe, recalled Bart Shepherd of the California Academy of Sciences, Claude’s home for 17 years before his death in December.<\/p>\n
“It’s no small feat to get a shoe out of an alligator,” Shepherd told a crowd of Claude’s fans in Golden Gate Park.<\/p>\n
It took a lot of anaesthesia, specialised tools, and multiple vets and staff members to extract the shoe from inside Claude – a task that was completed successfully, despite a fire alarm going off throughout the building at the time, Shepherd said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Claude wasn’t much of a talker, he barely moved, and never wore a costume to entice his audience…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-379784","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}