SLIDELL, La. – An 11-foot-long alligator bit off most of an 11-year-old boy's arm – at the shoulder – on Wednesday, the St. Tammany Parish sheriff's office said.

The boy, Devin Funck, and two girls were playing in a body of water around 3 p.m. at a subdivision near Slidell, about 20 miles northeast of New Orleans, when the alligator swam toward them and pulled the boy under, said Sheriff Jack Strain.

The alligator pulled Devin under water and bit off most of an arm, but the boy poked it in the eye and got free, relatives said.

The two girls with him made it to shore, ran for help and called 911. Three sheriff's deputies on patrol drove as far as they could toward the lake, then ran the final stretch – 1 1/2 miles – to reach the boy, Strain said.

The deputies helped the boy out of the water, and he was taken by 4-wheeler to a staging area where an ambulance picked him up and transported him to Slidell Memorial Hospital.

Later, the youngster was transported by helicopter to Ochsner Foundation Hospital in Jefferson. Strain said the boy was "fighting for his life."

"Our enforcement people reported the alligator had been shot," said Bo Boehringer, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. "The good news is the alligator was in an enclosed body of water and could not escape that area."

WDSU-TV in New Orleans reported the arm had been recovered but the sheriff's office did not immediately confirm that.

Alligator attacks in Louisiana are rare, said Noel Kinler, manager of the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries' alligator program. He said there was one last year, and two in 2005 and 2004, none serious.

"Typically an alligator is pretty docile," Kinler said. "But we take every chance to warn people that they need to be careful around them, especially large alligators."

Kinler speculated that an alligator as large as the one that attacked Funck might have mistaken the boy for something it would normally feed on.

"I can't say for sure, but certainly a young boy splashing his arms around could have seemed like a small animal to the gator," Kinler said.

Louisiana has 65 qualified hunters who handle about 5,000 calls about nuisance alligators a year, Kinler said. Of those calls, about 3,000 alligators are destroyed, he said.

"If an alligator is over 4 feet long we try to harvest it," Kinler said. "There is no sense in removing it and taking it somewhere else where it could just become a nuisance again."