You can’t spell “graduation” without “gator.”
A graduating McNeese State University student is shocking the internet with senior photoshoot with a 14-foot alligator named Big Al — including one shot where she’s planting a smooch right on the gator’s snout, her face mere inches from its wide-open jaws.
The photo is nuts — but not quite as nuts as it might seem.
Kat Daley, 22, who helps run Gator County in Beaumont, Texas with her fiancé Eddie said she wasn’t frightened during the shoot — and that it wasn’t her first time being face-to-face with an alligator.
“I really wanted to highlight what I do with these animals every day and what they mean to me,” the glam coed told The Post.
“I feel like reptiles are demonized in the media a lot more than they need to be, alligators specifically. They’re not as aggressive as people like to think. When people don’t interfere with those wild animals, they aren’t gonna interfere with us,” she said.
Her love for animals goes back to childhood; Daley started working in wildlife rehab at just 7 years old.
The pictures from the unconventional graduation shoot run the gamut, from Daley decked out in an elegant navy blue gown to snaps wearing her cap and gown wading knee-deep in water toward a massive alligator.
One shot even has her mortarboard resting on Big Al’s nose, its tassel dangling in the formidable beast’s mouth.
Laura Oglesbee, 45, the photographer who took the viral snaps, said Daley wasn’t frightened at all, and that she knows the gators’ temperament well.
“The alligators are trained, they only do it with Big Al and Big Tex, who have been trained for a long time. It’s not just some random alligator,” she said.
Oglesbee, whose husband used to wrestle gators at the park, had no issue getting up-close and personal with Big Al, but it was a different story for another picture she took of Daley posing with a “very poisonous” timber rattlesnake.
“I had to use my wide lens for that,” Oglesbee said. “They wouldn’t let me get too close for that one, but [Daley] just held that snake like it was nothing.”
Gator Country, which sits on 15 acres about 80 miles west of Houston, houses about 450 alligators at any given time, and takes in around 250 per year, making it the leading nuisance alligator trapper in the state, Daley said.
“We bring them here, take care of them, feed them, pretty much let them live out their best lives they can in captivity because they don’t have a chance in the wild,” she said of the park’s operations.
“I love the conservation aspect of it, where we get to save these animals that would otherwise be destroyed. But I also love the education aspect, getting people to see and interact with these animals and see they’re not so scary.”
Now that she’s graduated with a general studies degree and a natural sciences concentration, which she completed while working full time at the park, Daley said she’s in no hurry to do anything else.
“Honestly I kind of already have my dream job, so I think I’m just gonna stay right here and see where it takes me.”
