There was a unique friendship between “Chito”, a Costa Rican fisherman and his unusual friend “Pocho”, the crocodile longer than 5 meters, which weighed up to half a ton.
Chito first met with the crocodile after finding him with a gunshot wound on the banks of the Central American state’s Parismina river in 1991. He had been shot in the left eye by a cattle farmer and was close to death. He was weighing only a skinny 150 pounds (69 kg).
Chito and several friends loaded the animal into a boat and took him to Siquirres, where Pocho was nursed back to health. For six months, Snedden fed the crocodile chicken, fish and medicine and even slept with the crocodile during its recovery. Chito also simulated the chewing of food with his mouth to encourage the croc to eat and gave the him kisses and hugs while talking to it and petting it. “Food wasn’t enough. The crocodile needed my love to regain the will to live,” said Snedden. He hid Chito in an obscured pond under trees deep in a nearby forest until he obtained the necessary wildlife permits from Costa Rican authorities to own and raise the gravely injured crocodile legally.
After Pocho improved to normal health, Sneeden released to a nearby river to return to its normal life. The next morning, Sneeden awoke outside his home to find the crocodile had followed him home and was sleeping outside in his veranda. Living in the water outside Snedden’s home, the crocodile, who made a ‘decision’ and preferred to spend the rest of his life in Siquirres with the man who saved his life, became a member of Snedden’s family, along with his second wife and daughter. Snedden’s first wife had left him because he was spending too much time with the crocodile. “Once the crocodile followed me home, and came to me whenever I called its name, I knew it could be trained,” noted Snedden. “Another wife I could get. Pocho was one in a million.”
Pocho died of natural causes on October 12, 2011 in the water outside Snedden’s home in Siquirres. After the first human style public funeral ever given a crocodile, at which Snedden sang to his departed pet and held his ‘hand’, Pocho, was stuffed. Pocho remains on permanent display behind glass in the Sequirres town museum, and is forever a national treasure.
