As she does each afternoon, Danie Wright took her puppy out for a walk near a creek behind her home in her southwest Florida neighborhood.
But what began as a routine stroll on Wednesday with Dax, a 4-month-old Shih Tzu, turned into a harrowing attack by an alligator that suddenly emerged from the moss-covered creek and yanked on the dog’s collar.
“The next thing I heard was a squeak like my dog,” Ms. Wright recalled in an interview on Sunday. “I turned and looked, and an alligator had him. The alligator’s front teeth were through the collar of my dog.”
Ms. Wright, a professional dog sitter, said the alligator then tried to drag Dax into the water in Land O’Lakes, which is about 20 miles north of Tampa.
“I held onto the leash for dear life,” Ms. Wright said, adding that the alligator, which was about five feet long, also dragged her into the water.
She and the five-pound dog were in about a foot of water, she said, when she used her right hand to grab the dog’s collar, pull him out of the water and toss him back onto shore.
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