TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A Miami-Dade police officer turned an emergency tow rope into an improvised lasso when he was called to trap a scaly suspect lurking on the side of a southwest Miami-Dade County road.

According to WPLG, officers were called after a 6-foot alligator was spotted along the side of the road near Southwest 136th Street and 97th Avenue.

When officers arrived, they said the gator returned to the water before reemerging on a nearby field.

As authorities boxed the massive reptile in with their cruisers, one officer grabbed a tow rope and turned it into an improvised lasso.

“It’s a soft rope,” the officer later recalled in an interview with WPLG. “I was able to lasso it around its top legs, and it was in the midsection where I was able to hold it and secure it so it wouldn’t go out into the street.”

“I just made a split-second decision saying, ‘I gotta hold this gator, I gotta contain it,’ and that’s what I went by,” the officer added.

A trapper with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) eventually took control of the animal where it was loaded into a truck.