A 66-year-old retired corporate lawyer in Florida jumped on top of a 7-foot alligator all in an attempt to save his “best friend,” a small terrier dog named Bounce. “I just knew that my best friend was going to be dead,” Steve Gustafson told the Orlando Sentinel. “And I took off.” The grandfather was hanging out in his backyard of his home at The Villages, a retirement community near Orlando, while the 9-year-old West Highland terrier wandered close to the shore of a nearby pond. That’s when Gustafson said he heard Bounce yelp and saw the alligator carrying his dog away in its mouth.
“For whatever reason, I don’t know, I just yelled, ‘you’re not going to get her!’ and just leaped on the gator…just like you do some silly belly flop in a pool,” Gustafson told the paper. “The only difference was I landed on top of a gator.”
