More On: alligator
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Poor woman.
Monday, an alligator attacked a woman in Florida as she walked her dog, and the woman died.
WPBF said that the 85-year-old woman was walking her dog in the Fort Pierce neighborhood of Spanish Lakes Fairways when a 10-foot alligator jumped out of the water and attacked her. The outlet said that officials wouldn't say what happened to the woman after the attack, but they did say that she died from her injuries.
Officials have captured the gator. Neighbors in the Spanish Lakes community are out here watching.
— Sooji Nam (@WPBF_Sooji) February 20, 2023
Neighbors tell me they heard that a woman was walking her dog, and unfortunately died from the attack. @WPBF25News pic.twitter.com/UhBACwqD45
The alligator, which WPBF said weighed between 600 and 700 pounds, was known to the people who lived in the retirement community because it liked to sunbathe on the banks of the water.
After the attack, the alligator had to be taken out of the lake, which was not easy. "Caught him on the bottom. He was never seen again. He didn't get up at all. We got a second hook in him and then a hard line in him so we could pull him up. "It was definitely a fight," Robert Lilly, who catches alligators, told the outlet.
The Florida Wildlife Commission (FWC) said that alligators eat when they can and prefer to find easy-to-kill prey. The FWC says that they can get over their natural fear of people if people feed them often. Because of this, it is against the law in Florida to feed alligators in the wild.
Even though there are 1.3 million alligators in Florida, people rarely get hurt or die from attacks or bites that were not provoked, according to the FWC. In the last 10 years, the state has heard about an average of 8 serious bites per year that needed medical care. The FWC says that there have only been 442 unprovoked bites in the state since 1948, and 26 of them were fatal. The FWC also said that one in 3.1 million people will be attacked by an alligator without being provoked.
The FWC is looking into the event.
