Time was, an alligator wrestler could make a decent living. This was before YouTube. Before Steve Irwin. Before PETA. Back when kids were thrilled by the spectacle of nature and still enamored of the simple pleasures of watching man and beast roll around in a sand pit. Back when catching a fish was the highlight of summer vacation. Back when Wii was something you did in the community swimming pool.

“Used to be I could make seven hundred dollars a day,” says James Peacock, thirty-seven, who has been a wrestler at Native Village in Hollywood, Florida, for eighteen years. “Nowadays if I come home with a hundred dollars, it’s huge.”

From the early 1900s to as late as the 1990s, alligator wrestling was for many men in Florida a legitimate, fairly sexy career. Now alligator wrestling is largely extinct. Those who wrestle professionally all know each other; the fraternity is small enough that only first names are necessary. Most wrestlers have been trained by a handful of mentors scattered throughout the South, old-timers who have retired and are not being replaced.

“Of the five hundred people I’ve trained, maybe fifteen continue to wrestle,” Peacock says. One apprentice, twenty-one-year-old Marco Zeno, started learning at age twelve but was forced to leave Native Village for the more tourist-friendly Orlando because, he says, “everywhere else, alligator wrestling is dying.”

Another veteran, sixty-year-old Tim Williams, estimates that there are only about twenty true wrestlers left in Florida, and “probably only a couple handfuls of people who wrestle right,” which means men who know the techniques, men who respect the animal, men who keep their thumbs.

“I don’t know too many people training anymore,” Williams says wistfully. “We might be the last place.”

Williams is referring to his domain, Gatorland theme park, located in the belly of Orlando’s vacation district, a short drive from SeaWorld and Universal Studios. Will...