When you're dealing with an emergency gator situation, whatever comes to hand will have to suffice. A Florida man has made headlines after wrestling a gator with a trash can after dashing from his Sunday meal.
Videos by Wide Open Country
On Easter Sunday, a woman was letting out her dog in Jacksonville, Florida, when she spotted the seven-foot gator. She immediately called a wrangler to remove it from the residential area. It happened to fall to Mike Dragich to take care of the big lizard.
Despite being in the middle of his Easter Sunday dinner, he dropped his cutlery and ran to the rescue. There's a time for eating, and a time for wrestling prehistoric dinosaurs. This was the latter. He left the house so fast that he forgot his shoes, and all his gator trapping equipment, too, it seems.
Shoeless and toolless, Mike Dragich had to improvise with what he had to hand. The professional Florida man grabbed the nearest trash can and used that to ensnare and pacify the gator.
Trashcan Came To Hand To Trap Seven Foot Gator
Looking back on the Sunday evening incident, quick-thinking Dragich told FOX Weather, "I responded from an Easter dinner with family, and improvised using a trash can to remove the alligator from the property." Initially, he used two smaller trash cans to back the gator into a corner.
Once the dinosaur was in a corner, he used a third larger trash can to trap it. Coming up behind the gator, he used it to scoop the animal up from behind and close the lid on it. Once it was safely in the receptacle, he was able to carry it away and relocate it. The woman who called him can be heard cheering him on in the background.
Dropping everything to run and save a neighbour from a rampant gator is one thing. Doing it after a big feed and with no shoes on is another thing altogether. It's the kind of thing you only ever see somewhere like Florida.
Dragich is the hero of the hour, wrestling a gator without any shoes on and only using a collection of trash cans. His methods are unusual, but they certainly work.
