Bonner Herring has loved black Labs since he was 14, when he got his first Labrador retriever: a field-trial dropout he named Jet. A native of coastal North Carolina, Herring grew up jump-shooting ducks with his dad, whose job as a riverboat pilot allowed him to scout for birds while working.
Herring has trained and hunted with many retrievers since then. But he says his four-year-old Lab, Strike, is the greatest dog he’s ever had. And in early June, Herring put his own life at risk to save his best hunting buddy from a big bull alligator.
“Call me crazy. But when you’ve done it as long as I have, you know when you have a special one,” Herring tells Outdoor Life. “And I would say most every outdoorsman I know would have done the exact same thing. And, you know what? If the roles were reversed, and I was the one in the pond needing his help, he would have been the first one to my aid.”
Herring was on his 114-acre property outside Southport on June 9 when the alligator attacked Strike. He says the property, which he manages mostly for wildlife, abuts a planned community with several golf courses and interconnected ponds that are known to hold gators. He’s seen plenty of them on the property’s 5-acre pond and, as a coastal Southerner, he’s learned a thing or two about hunting and fishing around the large reptiles.
One of those lessons came in handy that morning, as Herring was tending his garden less than 100 yards away from the pond. It was a hot day, and during the hour or so Herring was thinning okra plants, Strike had made his way down to the pond to cool off in the shallows. Suddenly, Herring heard a piercing yelp followed by a loud splash — which in his mind meant only one thing. As Herring sprinted toward the edge of the pond, he remembered an old-timer he used to hunt ducks with in Florida, who also made a living collecting alligator eggs for the state.
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“We were hunting one day, and there was this big bull alligator roaring behind us, and so I asked Kenny. I said, ‘Man, what do you do when you have an aggressive gator defending its nest? Do you take a gun?’ He told me, ‘No, I just take a broomstick. And if you just tap them behind the head, they’ll get out of there.’”
Herring says that as he ran toward the sound, it felt like that conversation — one he’d had in a duck blind 20 years ago — had happened the day before. He didn’t have a broomstick, so he grabbed the next best thing he could find: a long-handled garden rake.
By the time he got to the shoreline, Strike was fully underwater, but Herring could see some ripples about 25 to 30 feet out. Looking over the tall grass, he finally saw the dog’s head pop up and the two locked eyes. Herring says he never slowed down or hesitated. He just dove into the pond with the rake in his hand and started swimming right at the alligator.
Herring made it out to his dog in a flash, and he wrapped his free arm around Strike’s chest. The dog wouldn’t budge, though, and when he tried to swim away, Herring realized the 10- to 11-foot gator still had a hold on Strike. He almost dropped the rake but thought better of it.
“I went at that son of a bitch with everything I had.”
“So we started swimming, kicking, and pulling, and finally we started making some progress. And I thought to myself, Please Lord, don’t let him come back on us,” Herring says. “Then, all of a sudden, that thing popped up right beside us, I’d say five or six yards away. And when he did, he wanted to show me what he was … He took a big inhale and popped up his whole body on the surface, and I saw for the first time how big he was. And I knew, quite frankly, that I had nothing on him. He was way too big for me to deal with.”
Still praying and swimming like hell, Herring eventually reached the shore, where he saw Strike’s mangled leg hanging from his hip. They went to a nearby vet, and then to an emergency clinic in Wilmington, where they prepped the dog for surgery.
“His [right] leg was broken in three places, and he had puncture wounds on both back legs,” says Herring, who paid around $10,000 in vet bills by the time it was all said and done. He says he’d pay that again in a heartbeat, and that Strike is now on the mend.
It will be some time — at least two months — until they can get back into a training routine. Herring also knows there’s a strong chance the dog will never be able to hunt again. But Strike will always have a place by his side and in the backseat of his truck. And Herring says that as long as he can help it, he’ll always bring his dog home at the end of the day.
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