Are Meth Gators Real? Can Gators Get a Taste for Human Blood? Poker Face Explained
Poker Face Season 2 introduces lots of new characters, including Daisy the drug-addled alligator.
**SPOILER WARNING! Spoilers below for Poker Face, Season 2, Episode 4!**
Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is used to dealing with the homicidal horseplay of humans on Peacock's Poker Face, but in Season 2, Episode 4, “The Taste of Human Blood,” she comes face to face with an allegedly murderous reptile.
After being nominated for Cop of the Year, office Fran Lamont (Gaby Hoffman) attends the annual FlopaCopas (the Florida Panhandle Cop Awards) under duress. Despite objectively deserving the award, she loses to Joseph Pilson (Kumail Nanjiani), a mild-mannered officer who recently adopted a baby alligator rescued from a drug bust. The award and subsequent fame goes to his head, and Pilson transforms himself into a walking meme, the online sensation Gator Joe.
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Six years later, Joe’s star has risen in exact proportion to Fran’s declining mental health. Along the way, Daisy (the rescued alligator) transforms from a handheld reptile in a BabyBjörn into a massive and toothy predator. When Fran learns that Gator Joe is about to win his seventh straight FlopaCopa, she sets a dastardly plan in motion. Spiking his energy drink with some reptile laxative should do the trick, but when Fran messes up the dosage, Joe ends up dead.
Hoping to get rid of the evidence, Fran coaxes Daisy out of her cage, doses her with methamphetamine, and lets nature take its course. When the rest of the trigger-happy officers at the FlopaCopas get wind of what happened, they deem Daisy a vicious killer with a taste for human blood and set out on a mission to put her down.
Do animals really get a taste for human blood?
It depends on the animal. There is some evidence of individual predators repeatedly targeting humans, but the reality is more complicated than simply getting a taste for people.
It’s a common refrain whenever an animal attacks a human. From sharks and bears to dogs and gators, once an animal has eaten a person, someone is bound to claim they’ve acquired “a taste for human blood.” The implication, of course, is that the animal must be captured and killed to keep the public safe. There may be some truth to those claims, at least with some predators, but not all.
It has been suggested that human blood is saltier than other prey animals and predators prefer the taste. While it’s true that some individuals may have higher sodium levels in their blood, humans average between 135 and 145 milliequivalent units per liter (mEq/L) while deer, a common prey animal, average 157.6 mEq/L. The claim that humans have higher salt concentrations just isn’t true. More often, repeated animal attacks are the result of humans encroaching on habitats and reducing or eliminating prey.
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In the late 19th Century, a pair of male lions killed and ate an estimated 35 people in Kenya’s Tsavo region over the course of nine months. Overhunting, pestilence, and drought had reduced historical prey populations, and the building of a new railroad pushed humans into wild habitat. With nothing else to eat, the lions hunted railway workers, dragging them from their tents at night. Even in this extreme case, targeting humans probably had less to do with the taste and more to do with a lack of other options and the fact that we’re relatively easy prey.
Some predators may learn to preferentially hunt humans, but that’s probably not the norm. "In these situations, there's a natural propensity to single out a cause that's easily manageable, like there's one bad croc or one bad shark and if it's attacked once, obviously it will do it again – that it likes the taste," University of Adelaide Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies director Sandy McFarlane said, via HuffPost Australia. "Whereas accepting that it's actually a more complex problem is much more difficult to take in and make coherent.”
Are meth gators a real problem in the South?
Of course, it’s one thing to talk about sober animals; it’s harder to know what an animal might do under the influence of powerful mind-altering drugs. Back in 2019, a police department in Loretto, Tennessee warned residents against flushing drugs down the toilet, lest they accidentally create meth-powered gators.
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“Folks … please don’t flush your drugs m’kay ... our sewer guys take great pride in releasing water that is cleaner than what is in the creek, but they are not really prepared for meth. Ducks, Geese, and other fowl frequent our treatment ponds and we shudder to think what one all hyped up on meth would do,” the post read, via NBC News. “Furthermore, if it made it far enough we could create meth-gators in Shoal Creek and the Tennessee River down in North Alabama.”
However, biologists noted it’s unlikely flushed drugs could reach an alligator in high enough concentrations to impact their behavior. That said, you still shouldn’t dump anything down the toilet, outside of the usuals. Officials later stated that the meth gator post was a joke, but the guidance not to flush drugs still stands.
Catch Season 2 of Poker Face (and check in on Daisy) right now on Peacock.
