Crocodiles Captured in Kanazawa

Watch your step if you’re walking through rice fields in Kanazawa, folks. That place is known to be infested with crocodiles:

Two 1-meter-long crocodiles were caught here in a rice paddy and a residential area over the weekend, police said Monday.

Investigators suspect that the crocodiles, one of them believed to be a spectacled caiman, escaped or were dumped after being kept as pets, and are looking for their owners.

At about 3 p.m. on Saturday, a man harvesting rice in a paddy in the Isobemachi district of Kanazawa caught a crocodile and handed it over to a local police station. The crocodile is believed to be a spectacled caiman that inhabits Latin America.

A local resident found another crocodile in a ditch in a residential area of Kanazawa about 800 meters away from the rice paddy at around 8:10 p.m. on Sunday, and alerted police. Officers managed to capture the animal. The breed of the second crocodile has not been confirmed yet.

Here’s a video news report about of one of the crocs: