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Girl after shark attack: 'I like dolphins way better'

A 6-year-old girl attacked by a shark was in good condition and good spirits at a North Carolina hospital Wednesday, telling her parents: "I hate sharks. I like dolphins way better."
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/ Source: NBC News and msnbc.com

A 6-year-old girl attacked by a shark was in good condition and good spirits at a North Carolina hospital Wednesday, telling her parents: "I hate sharks. I like dolphins way better."

The child was boogie-boarding Tuesday, when officials say she was bitten by a shark at about 5:30 p.m. off Ocracoke Island at the southernmost end of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

The girl was swimming on a boogie board in very shallow water when she was bitten on the lower right leg and foot, said Cyndy Holda, spokeswoman for the National Park Service Outer Banks Group. Her parents released a statement saying the mother was 10 feet away and witnessed the event.

"Paramedics arrived promptly and she received excellent medical attention from EMS personnel, life-flight crew, and Pitt County Memorial Hospital medical staff in Greenville," the parents said in statement. "She is in good spirits, declaring this morning that, 'I hate sharks. I like dolphins way better.' "

Hyde County spokeswoman Jamie Tunnell said bystanders described the shark as having a "black tip or black fin, which is the type of sharks that have been known to be in this area."

Witnesses in North Carolina are still reeling from the attack.

"I really want to know that she's okay," Barkley Davis told WAVY-TV . "I did not like what I saw, and it really tore me up."

Barkley, who along with his wife Letitia, saw the attack, t old they rushed into the water to help the young girl, who by then was being carried out by her father.

"I just thought she had a gash," Barkley Davis . "I thought she has been sliced, until he held her leg up and showed us and it was not good."

No other swimmers were injured and area beaches remained open, but visitors are on high alert.

It was the first shark attack at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a prime tourist destination that extends more than 70 miles from South Nags Head to Ocracoke Inlet, since Sept. 3, 2001, when a 28-year-old Russian visitor was killed off Avon, Holda said.

With the warmer water temperatures and time of day, shark sightings are not uncommon in the area, park rangers said.

"This time of year we have a lot of people in the water that are on vacation. We also have a very active marine fishery with bait in the water," Holda said.

According to the website Shark Attack File.info, this is the second shark-bite incident in the waters of North Carolina in less than a month.

In late June, a shark bit 10-year-old Cassidy Cartwright twice in the leg before letting go. That incident happened in about three feet of water in North Topsail, an area about 130 miles southwest of Tuesday's incident.

"I thought it was just somebody messing around, and I found out that it wasn't, because it pulled me down again," a recovering Cartwright told NBC News.

The site shows 15 attacks so far in the United States in 2011 by sharks, none of them deadly.