Army Veteran Saves Family Rescue Dog From Alligator Attack

WESLEY CHAPEL, FLA. — In the more than one year since Trent Tweddale and his wife have lived on a sustainable farm property situated near a seasonal stream where their dog, Loki, likes to take morning swims, never once has the couple encountered an alligator.

That all changed last week, however, when Loki, a 6-year-old mixed-breed rescue pooch, had his paws in the riverbed that had been dry a day earlier but that had swelled following a tropical storm. Without warning, Loki was pulled into the water by a 13-foot gator. Tweddale, a 32-year-old former Army staff sergeant, instinctively lunged into the knee-deep water and managed to wrestle the dog away from the alligator and to safety.

Before doing so, Tweddale had two initial thoughts. One, the dog is gone. Two, he’s not gone just quite yet.

“It all happened so fast,” Tweddale told Patch in a phone interview on Monday. “It seemed like a million years and a second all at the same time.”

When the alligator initially got ahold of Loki, Tweddale attempted to grab the dog by the collar in an attempt to save the dog, which his wife rescued from a kill shelter five years ago. But when the alligator didn’t let go, Tweddale entered the water and struck the alligator over the head in an attempt to get possession of the pet.

While doing so, Tweddale screamed to his wife, Dr. Kristina Deak, who was in the house with the couple’s 8-week-old son just more than 100 yards away. Because the house is sound-proof, Tweddale ended up having to call Kristina on the phone to get her to come to where he and the dog were.

The tug-of-war between Tweddale and the alligator nearly severed Loki’s leg, which Kristina held together on the way to the veterinary office, where Loki underwent emergency surgery.

“I’ll never forget running outside to (Tweddale’s) screams and holding Loki’s shredded, broken leg together to stop the bleeding,” Deak wrote in a Facebook post about the encounter. “I thought for sure Loki would die in my arms before we made it (to the vet’s).

“But even in his most painful moments, Loki was still being our best boy.”

Said Tweddale: "Kristina had as much to do with saving Loki's life as I did."

As of Monday, Tweddale said there is only a 50-50 chance that the dog’s front leg will be able to be saved. The vet is concerned about the blood circulation in the limb, which will determine if it can be saved. Loki’s leg is being held in place by metal plates and screws, and Tweddale, Kristina and their young son, Connor, remain hopeful. Otherwise, Loki should recover.

Still, the encounter with the alligator remains a bit of a blur.

“Absolutely no thought went into this at all,” Tweddale said Monday. “It wasn’t calculated. No one knows how they will react in a situation like this until it happens.

“It was really traumatic. I did nine years in the Army, and that was the most traumatic day of my life. The dog’s a member of the family, and then there is just the sheer violence of it.”

In the days since, there have been no signs of any alligators after what Tweddale believes may have been an isolated incident. Because there are sewage drains and other limited ways the gator could have been washed into the small stream, Tweddale does not expect many more visits. The construction of new subdivisions nearby is destroying the wetlands, which Tweddale attributes to the increase in wildlife that is being seen in less densely populated areas such as where his farm is located.

But to be safe, he plans to build a fence at the edge of the water to protect Loki and his newborn son as he gets older.

Even with a fence, the day will be one neither Tweddale nor his wife will forget.

“I don’t know who the bigger badass is, Trent or Loki,” Deak wrote on Facebook. “But I’m so fortunate to have them both in my life."