Sometimes, puppies stick their noses where they shouldn’t:
Coral Springs resident Michael Rubin took the 6-month old puppy, named Jasmine, for a run with his border collie Monday morning. They were near a pond in the Heron Bay development in northwestern Coral Springs, on the edge of the Everglades, when the puppy ran about 20 yards ahead to the edge of the water. That’s when Rubin heard the dog squealing.
When he went to check on her, he saw the puppy’s head inside the mouth of a 6-foot alligator.
Like in an alligator’s mouth. Gator 1, Puppy 0.
“The gator was flipping her over and killing her,” Rubin told our news partners at The Herald. That’s when he jumped into the water and started beating the animal with his fist.
Okay folks, let’s stop right there. This is a six-foot alligator. Big as a person. Clearly hungry — or at least peckish.
If you decide to get between a gator and its snack, I figure there’s a decent chance you’re losing an arm. I mean, maybe you get away without a scratch, maybe it nabs a finger, maybe it takes your face, I don’t know. But gators are on a bit of a killing spree in Florida right now, so I figure an arm’s about the average expected loss.
You have to ask yourself: is your pet worth an arm?
There’s no right answer, though I’m expecting half of you to be aghast that I would even think of letting a gator carry off my puppy by the head and the other half to think it’s insane to even consider fighting an alligator for something replaceable like a puppy. I fall somewhere in the middle. I like to think that I would dive in after my dog and go whup some leathery hide, but I also like my arms and using them and stuff. I could go either way, probably depending on whether I was full of rage and bile from reading one of those pathetic doublespeak posts from Jeff Low-self-e-stein or not.
Overall, I think the loss of an arm is a fair evaluation of the risk. Would you do it?
Rubin said the punches didn’t deter the reptile. The puppy’s head was locked in the gator’s mouth and she didn’t seem to be moving. Rubin feared she was dead. ”It was kind of like I’m not letting this gator have her,” said Rubin, 45.
Well, alright, then. You’re fighting a gator, it’s not killing you, but you’re at a standstill. Gator 1, Puppy 0, Man 0.
So you did the unthinkable but it didn’t work, and now you’re dog’s probably dead. About the only thing to be gained from pursuing your dog’s body in a gator’s mouth: it’s an excellent chance to find out how much God loves you. Or not.
He eventually pried the dog loose and rushed her to Coral Springs Animal Hospital where she was treated for cuts and puncture wounds.
Rubin said “I just reacted. Maybe it wasn’t the brightest thing to do. Thank God, my dog is alive. You love your animal, sometimes you do crazy things.”
Amazingly, the dog was alive and is probably playing friskily as we type. The judges deduct a point from the gator and give it to the dude, making it Puppy 0, Gator 0, Man 1. We have a winner.
Except it isn’t us, and it sure as hell isn’t the uncredited journalist of what has to be the worst-written article in news history.
Someone managed to fight off a gator in some fashion other than using his fists (punches weren’t working, remember), take a live puppy from its mouth, and toddle off with a scratch, and all you can say is that “he eventually pried the dog loose?” He had to open the jaw somehow, or else his pooch would be sans noggin. When he took the dog, why didn’t the gator take his ankle? How the fuck did the puppy live despite having its head enveloped in a gator’s maw for so long?
Augh. CBS4 in Miami, if I ever find the head of anything I care about stuck in a gator’s mouth and don’t know how to get it out of there, I am so totally suing your ass.
I think you punch it in the nose.
Or maybe that’s sharks.
That’s sharks, I think. Alligators and crocodiles are jabs to the nostrils, if I recall correctly. But I live in Ohio, which is shark and gator free. Ask me about deer.
Oh, and if I remember my Reader’s Digest correctly (OK, so I was a conservative 10-year-old. It made sense at the time) once the gator is flipping your or your pet around, you’re almost completely fucked.
Readers Digest is for conservatives?!
And here I thought it was only for people who were afraid of big words.
No no, phone PETA, they can kill any random animal with little or no notice required, just remember to tell them that the gator is a pet and the puppy is a stray, and they’ll kill the correct animal.
Coating your puppy in a form of alligator specific poison would also be good.
The only other thing I can think of is if you throw an impromptu birthday dinner for it, thus forcing it to spit out the puppy so that it can deprecate and act surprised while eating cake.
Then grab the puppy and run, alligators, while good sprinters, are terrible over long distances, especially after cake.
Ever hear of a marathon runner being eaten by an alligator? I rest my case.
Puppies are like Jalapeno Poppers to gators. Or Cheese Sticks.
but… but…
HOW THE HELL DID THE DUDE GET HIS PUPPY OUT?
WTF… First they go into suuuuuch detaaaail over where exactly the dude and the puppy were, right down to like, the street corner, and then it’s like, “And they all lived happily ever after”.
And this was written by an actual degree-bearing journalist?