A gregarious Florida alligator seemingly could not wait for a family’s birthday party to begin, so it slipped into a garage where supplies were being stored and chugged down a slab of Diet Coke.
The uninvited guest surprised Naples homeowners Karyn and Jamie Dobson when they opened the connecting door from their house after hearing a crash, WINK News reported.
“I open the door about a quarter way, peek my head in, and there’s the alligator,” Jamie Dobson said. He said the 8ft crocodilian was backing away, with froth from the cans all over the floor.
The couple had purchased several slabs of sodas for Karyn Dobson’s party a few days later.
“There was Diet Coke spewing everywhere because the gator tore open the box [and] had a few cans, probably thought it was beer maybe,” she said.
“We were all standing there like a scaredy cat. People have sent me texts and emails … they have all these comments [like] ‘What a great birthday present.’”
The alligator is believed to have sneaked in after the couple returned from walking their dog and neglected to close the garage door. The Dobsons said they had recently moved to the area from Chicago and were not aware of the danger of leaving the garage door open.
“[It’s] something [that being] from the midwest I really haven’t experienced before,” Jamie Dobson said.
A trapper caught the alligator and relocated it to a non-residential area.
Alligator encounters in built-up communities are more frequent during mating season, which began in April and lasts until June as the reptiles emerge from the swamps and go looking for a partner.
Wildlife officials say they rarely pose a direct threat to humans.
“Alligators seldom bite people for reasons other than food,” the Florida fish and wildlife commission says in its human-alligator incidents fact sheet, which notes the state has a “healthy” population of about 1.3 million of the reptiles.
“Female alligators may protect their nests by hissing and opening their mouths to frighten intruders but rarely bite people. Alligator bites are most likely to occur in or around water.”
