An internet-famous pet alligator went missing in Georgia while his family was visiting friends there and his owner believes he was stolen from a fenced-in yard in a twisted prank.
Joie Henney, of Jonestown, Pennsylvania, shared a tearful plea for help finding his pet gator and emotional support animal on the reptile’s TikTok page.
“Between 4:30 a.m. and 7 a.m., someone came in and stole Wally,” Henney told the camera in the clip shared on Saturday.
“He is missing. He was taken out of an enclosure while we were visiting friends in Georgia. We need all the help we can get to bring my baby back,” he said, breaking down. “Please we need your help.”
Henney, who called himself “Wally-gator’s dad,” adopted Wally in 2015 when the wild animal was rescued in Florida at 14 months old. He credited the cold-blooded animal for helping him through his battle with depression following the deaths of multiple close friends in a 2019 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
His doctor even endorsed the 5.5-foot gator as an emotional support animal.
The 8-year-old reptile is a gentle giant who has never tried to bite anyone and can sense people’s emotions, according to Henney.
Wally’s social media pages are filled with videos and photos of people hugging the scaled creature like a small child, cuddling with him, and even giving him kisses on his snout. Henney often brings his unusual pet to meet-and-greets and kids’ birthday parties, where he poses for photo ops.
Now Henney said he’s distraught without his beloved alligator who vanished on April 21.
He believes the people who stole him from the fenced-in yard used Wally to prank unsuspecting homeowners.
The pranksters left him outside the person’s home and the person reported the sighting to authorities, who then trapped the gator and released him into the wild, Henney said in social media posts.
A caller in the Brunswick area reported a “nuisance alligator” on April 21 — the day Henney said Wally disappeared — and a licensed trapper came to catch it, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources said.
That gator was “released in a remote location,” the agency added while noting that it does not know if it was Wally or not.
Alligators cannot be kept as pets in the state of Georgia, but Pennsylvania where Wally and Henney live have no laws against alligator ownership.
“Wally is totally different [than other alligators]. There’s none other like him ever,” Henney said in a past video.
