Thank you so much for all this information. You say the community has been through this before, what do you mean by that?I live about 3 miles as the crow flies from where this is happening and you're right there are a few alligators in Corney Lake and I suspect some are in Lake Claiborne but I doubt there's any in the ponds. Most likely because there's not enough food to support them like there would be in a lake. We've never seen any fishing any of them anyway. There's literally hundreds of ponds in this area. There was a lot of dairies in this area last century and everyone has ponds. The house I own was the operations center for a dairy and I have a pond and the acreage that was the actual dairy has another one 400 or so yards from that one in the back field. There's a pond across the road, the property next to it has one, my neighbor across the street has one and their neighbor also has one as well as just about every property connected to those. A lot of them were put in by the WPA or CCC in the 1930s. My friends and their kids fish a lot of them and have never seen any gators in them so I wouldn't worry to much about that aspect. What most of them do have is rather large snapping turtles, water moccasins (probably to cold for them to be an issue) and as you mentioned there's bear, feral hogs, lots of coyotes, bobcat, fox and the occasional cougar. We also have a wolf hybrid that reported sightings have been made, but that's extremely rare. Like you said a lot of these ponds are very inaccessible especially at the waters edge due to lack of maintenance over many decades of no longer being needed for their original intent, to water livestock. My neighbor's daughter and son-in-law are Claiborne Parish volunteer firefighters out of the Summerfield station and were part of the search from the start. I also know the Sheriff, Ken Bailey, he's a good man and will not give up until this child is found if he's still in this area. This community has been through this before and they did as I knew they would, they came together to help in any way they could. All we can do now is hope for the best.
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