A Central Florida pet owner is mourning the loss of her pit bull after a large alligator attacked the dog and ate him.
Cynthia Robinson was taking “Tank” out for a walk early Thursday morning near an Auburndale retention pond when a gator emerged from the water and attacked.
“My dog didn’t even know what happened to him. He had that look like, yelping,” Robinson told News Channel 8. “He was like ‘Help me mama,’ but I couldn’t do nothing.”
It made her 100-pound pit bull look like a “chihuahua,” she said.
Helpless, she watched the alligator take her dog down.
“All I could do was stand there and watch my dog get eat,” she told Spectrum News 9. “And I just don’t want it to happen to no one else or a kid or anything.”
A trapper caught and removed an 11-foot gator in the area late Thursday afternoon, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission confirmed Friday morning. They believe it is the alligator who killed Tank.
Officials say residents should keep their pets on a short leash and away from the water to help avoid alligator encounters.
Michelle Marchante covers the pulse of healthcare in South Florida and also the City of Coral Gables. Before that, she covered the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, crime, education, entertainment and other topics in South Florida for the Herald as a breaking news reporter. She recently won first place in the health reporting category in the 2025 Sunshine State Awards for her coverage of Steward Health’s bankruptcy. An investigative series about the abrupt closure of a Miami heart transplant program led Michelle and her colleagues to be recognized as finalists in two 2024 Florida Sunshine State Award categories. She also won second place in the 73rd annual Green Eyeshade Awards for her consumer-focused healthcare stories and was part of the team of reporters who won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for the Miami Herald’s breaking news coverage of the Surfside building collapse. Michelle graduated with honors from Florida International University and was a 2025 National Press Foundation Covering Workplace Mental Health fellow and a 2020-2021 Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism fellow. Support my work with a digital subscription
