Sometimes, life in Florida really bites.

An unnamed Nokomis, Fla., resident wasted no time when he realized his Labrador retriever had fallen into a canal behind his house — and was being eaten alive by a 6- to 8-foot-long alligator.

“The homeowner heard a commotion and ran out. Saw the alligator had the dog. He jumped in the canal, pried the alligator’s mouth open, and got the dog,” Lt. Rob Gerkin of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission told WWSB/ABC7 on a Facebook Live broadcast.

“We got a happy ending to this one,” said Gerkin. “They don’t always happen that way.”

The man and his chocolate lab both managed to survive the Aug. 2 incident — with the owner’s injuries minor enough that he was able to take the dog to the vet himself.

A trapper captured the gator around 11 p.m. Friday, some six hours after the attack.

Seeing the reptile spurred the man’s neighbors to take action.

“I had a friend come over Monday and build this fence, because I have two dogs and I had to be able to let them out,” Kelley Ann Ayers told ABC7. “It was scary. It was very scary.”

While it may seem like gator attack stories have been more frequent in the Sunshine State of late, that’s not actually the case. A study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management in July concluded that the risk of being attacked by a gator has not changed significantly in Florida between 1971 and 2014.

The study also offered advice: “The risk of alligator bites can be reduced by educating people likely to interact with alligators, and by selectively removing problem alligators in human residential areas and water bodies used regularly by people for swimming, wading, and shoreline activities.”