As she does each afternoon, Danie Wright took her puppy out for a walk near a creek behind her home in her Florida neighborhood.

But what began as a routine stroll 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,” Wright recalled in an interview Sunday. “I turned and looked, and an alligator had him. The alligator’s front teeth were through the collar of my dog.”

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,” Wright said, adding that the alligator, which was about 5 feet long,

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