That is the salient point here. There's no context applied to any of this.
Like someone else said in this thread, I bet tracking dogs like Smokey were used to hunt down fugitive slaves. Does Smokey need to go? It's basically the exact same thing as what Florida just did. Do the New England Patriots need to go? After all, what they ultimately were fighting for was the establishment of a country, part of which allowed for slavery. You can do this kind of thing all day to the point where virtually any team name, even something innocuous like "Tigers" could be seen as offensive.
Many disagree, but I think context matters here. If "gator bait" was adopted as a chant precisely because of the folklore around it, then by all means get rid of it. But that isn't what occurred.
