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People getting killed by alligators is extremely rare," said Adam Rosenblatt, an assistant professor of biology at the University of North Florida who studies how alligators respond to changing environments.
Between 1999 and 2019, alligators killed 10 people in the southeastern U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In that same time period and in the same area, nearly five times as many people were killed by dogs, and nearly 12 times as many people were killed by lightning, he said.
"A lot of human-alligator conflict occurs when alligators get provoked, both intentionally and unintentionally, or when alligators go after people's pets," Rosenblatt told Live Science. When hungry, alligators might go after people, but those types of situations are "rarer," he said.
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