Living With a Bobcat

Before we get started here, let me say that I don't have a bobcat and I have never had one.  We have two mostly normal cats, but no bobcats.  I had a friend whose family had adopted a bobcat when it was a kitten.  The only reason I’m writing this post is that I did a post here 5 years ago about a meth addict that featured their bobcat. This is basically just a follow-up featuring a lot more bobcat.

My friend Mike’s aunt and uncle lived on a farm about an hour from Omaha.  They found a litter of kittens in their beat up old barn and thought the kittens had been abandoned my their mother.  There were a ton of feral cats on and around their farm, so it wasn’t unusual to see mothers with kittens there.

During a visit, Mike’s aunt mentioned the kittens in the barn and somehow Mike and his sister Kari convinced their parents to let them bring one home.  They named him Bob.  This was pure coincidence because they didn’t realize right away that he was actually a bobcat.  A few weeks later Mike’s uncle called to tell his family that their new kitten was actually a bobcat.  His uncle told them that the reason they never saw the mother was that she was probably out killing things for them to eat and that they had eventually seen her one day.  They told Mike’s family that the mother was very large and fearsome looking.  They just left her alone and stopped feeding the kittens several times a day.  Eventually mom and the remaining kittens left on their own and went somewhere else.

Mike’s family had a family meeting and decided they would keep Bob until he became a problem, but he never did.  He grew up as a beloved member of their family and never exhibited any aggressive behavior or acted like a wild animal.  He was basically a very large house cat.  He got along great with everyone and played in the back yard with their German shepherd and husky dogs.  They also had a small dog that was some kind of yappy, spoiled, bitchy, long-haired lapdog that Bob ignored for the most part.  Bob could have swallowed that dog in one bite, but he was never inclined to do so.

Mike and I were part of a group of four or five guys who hung around together all the time.  After school we would generally go over to someone’s house and discuss school, girls, and sports.  When one of us was on a sports team the rest of us went and watched the practices, afterwards offering suggestions for improvement like we were seasoned professionals in that sport.  We had no actual knowledge of what we were talking about, but we did it anyway.

None of us were involved in winter sports, so during the winter months we usually just went over to someone’s house after school.  We liked to go to Mike’s house the best because they the house was huge and they always had the best snacks. Mike’s mom was always great to us and Mike’s sister was hot.  Kari was a couple of years older than us and she always tried to keep her distance from us, but still stay close enough to hear everything we were talking about. When we were at Mike’s house his two larger dogs and Bob would hang out with us.  At first we were all nervous about hanging out with a live bobcat, but over time he was just like one of the dogs and we got used to him.  Usually he would just find a place to sit down and listen intently to our conversations.  When we went out into Mike’s large back yard, Bob and both of the dogs would also join us through the doggy door that Mike’s dad had installed in the back door.  

Playing outside with Bob was an experience.  Apparently bobcats have a natural instinct that compels them to go after flying things and rip them to shreds.  We saw this happen to a few unlucky birds who attempted to fly too low across the back yard.  Bob was very muscular so he could jump really high and easily catch a bird in mid flight if it trespassed into his airspace.  None of us wanted to try and take a dead bird away from a full grown male bobcat for obvious reasons, so we would just watch in horror as he dismembered the bird and swallowed it, bones and all.  A few times he attempted to take his catch back into the house to consume it inside, but each time he was met with angry screams from Mike’s mother and he would quickly emerge from the doggy door back into the yard without the bird.  She would then glare at all of us through the kitchen window and shake her head at us as we did our best not to laugh.

The reason I bring up the whole flying prey subject is that we would frequently take a football outside with us to play catch while we discussed our usual topics of girls, school, girls, sports, and girls.  As the football flew through the air from one person to the next, Bob would chase it and if one of us happened to throw a pass that didn’t have much altitude he would usually jump and intercept it in mid air.  Once Bob had the football there wasn’t much we could do about it.  That was the end of the football.  He would already have several punctures in it before his feet even hit the ground.  There would be no saving that that football.  Again, none of us were inclined to try wrangling with a full grown male bobcat with huge teeth and very sharp claws.  We lost a number of footballs to Bob.  Sometimes he would tear off chunks of leather and eat them, but mostly he was just proud of himself for intercepting another flying object and subduing it.

During the day when Mike’s family was away, Bob slept most of the time.  At least we all thought he slept.  But sometimes he apparently didn’t sleep and became bored.  One cloudy and cold Wednesday, Mike and I decided to go to his house after school and play his Atari Pong game console.  If you’ve never heard of Pong, it was one of the first electronic games that you could hook up to your television.  It was like an electronic ping pong game where the ball bounced around the screen and you had to maneuver a paddle and position it to hit it so it wouldn’t go off the screen at the bottom.  By today’s standards it was rather uninspiring, but that was 1975 so it was pretty much a technological miracle back then.  An Atari was pretty expensive so not many people had them.

On this particular Wednesday, we walked from school over to Mike’s anticipating a couple of hours of Pong before I walked home for dinner.  When we opened the front door to go in we were met with feathers.  Lots and lots of small white feathers.  They were everywhere.  They were covering everything in every room.  We instantly knew Bob was the culprit.  We surmised that someone had forgotten to lock the doggy door and Bob had gone outside and caught a large bird to bring inside and dismember.  

In a truly stunning display of 15-year-old boys’ logic, we simply closed the front door and walked over to my house, opting to just pretend we didn’t know anything about the spectacle that would await the rest of the family when they got home.  We later found out that Bob had dragged one of those double wide king-sized bed pillows from the guest bedroom downstairs into the living room and ripped it open to see what was inside.  Unsatisfied with what he found inside the pillow he went and got another one, obviously hoping he would find something more interesting inside the second one.  Later that night Mike successfully convinced his parents that finding goose down all over the house was infinitely better than finding bloody bird parts scattered everywhere.  Throughout all the drama and ensuing cleanup Bob just acted like nothing unusual was going on.

Bob didn’t spend as much time outside during the cold winter months.  Nebraska winters are notoriously cold and windy.  In the 1970’s we always got a lot of snow during the winter, much more than we get now.  Snows of over 12 inches were commonplace.  One of Mike’s household chores was to clear the walks each time it snowed.  His father had been kind enough to buy him a large snowblower to use, but it still took quite a long time to get everything cleared off after each snow.  Included in the areas that Mike cleared was a large patio in the back yard.  During the winter the snow in their back yard got very deep and Mike kept the patio clear so Bob and the dogs would have a place to do their business and walk around a bit.

One morning Bob went outside with the dogs as usual.  They usually just went outside and took care of nature’s call before quickly returning to the warmth of the kitchen through the doggy door.  On this morning Bob didn’t return.  After about 30 minutes Mike went out to find him.  Bob was sitting up in a medium sized maple tree in the middle of the yard.  He was about 15 feet up the tree sitting on a large branch.  Bobcats are very skilled climbers.  He wasn’t doing anything.  Just sitting there looking around.  He was still sitting in the tree when Mike left for school an hour later.  When the last person left the house for the day they left the doggy door unlocked  for him, thinking he would get cold and come inside while they were gone.  He had other plans.

Now you’d think the family would hesitate leaving for the day with a full grown bobcat sitting in a tree in their yard, but they left anyway, expecting to find him inside and sleeping on the couch later when they got home.  They didn't consider the possibility of Bob leaving the yard and mauling a neighbor’s kid or maybe even being hit by a car.  Apparently bobcats are somewhat territorial and Bob considered the back yard as his territory, so he almost never strayed out of his private kingdom.  There was a very large park with both open and wooded areas less than a block away, but Bob never went there.  We decided that there must have been another bobcat living there and Bob wanted to avoid encountering it.  We discussed the tree situation at length during the school day and decided that we should go directly to Mike’s house to check on Bob when we got out of school.

When we got to Mike’s house we immediately started looking for Bob.  Not finding him in any of his usual favorite spots throughout the house, we went out to the back yard.  There he was, still sitting in the tree.  Just sitting there casually and doing absolutely nothing.  There were no new footprints in the snow surrounding the tree so we knew he had just been sitting there all day.  We tried to coax him down but after many tries we were still unsuccessful.

Now, if you’ve ever had a cat you know that it’s very hard to get them to do anything they don’t want to do.  They will simply ignore your best efforts to get them to do what you want.  They do this not out of malice, but just because that’s the way cats are.  Bobcats are the same way.  If they don’t want to do something then they’re not going to do it.  A situation can become more complicated with a bobcat, however, because they’re very powerful wild animals.  A mad bobcat can tear you up pretty badly in just a few seconds.  Bob was very domesticated, but we feared that there was enough wildness still left in him that we decided it wouldn’t be in our best interest to climb up there and grab him.  We tried to coax him down with a bowl of food, some raw chicken breasts, and a couple of cans of good quality tuna, but he just wasn’t interested and remained in the tree.

By this time, the rest of Mike’s family had come home and we all stood on the patio and stared at Bob.  He stared back.  Six to ten inches of new snow was expected that night into the next morning, so they were worried about Bob siting in the tree all night. Mike’s mother called the vet and he said that if Bob didn’t appear to be in distress we should just leave him there and he would probably come down when he was good and ready.  We briefly discussed the option of calling the fire department and asking them to bring him down, but soon we all agreed that the fire department option would surely be disastrous for Bob and the unlucky firefighter who had to climb up and get him.  Besides, bobcats were considered dangerous animals by the city government and it was illegal to own one within the city limits.  So we decided to just wait for him to come down on his own.

When I got to school the next morning I found Mike and asked about Bob’s status.  Bob was still up in the tree.  After school we went over to Mike’s and tried one again to convince Bob to leave the tree.  He wasn’t having it.  We even tried sacrificing a nice Rawlings leather football by placing it in the snow under the tree but he wasn’t interested.  He just sat there on the branch and stared at us, completely unimpressed by our heroic efforts to rescue him.

Bob stayed up in that tree for another two days.  On the evening of the third day he came walking in the doggy door, jumped up onto the counter, and helped himself to a large bowl of spaghetti and meatballs intended to be the family’s dinner.  After satisfying his hunger, he casually walked past Mike’s family into the living room and laid down on the couch, smearing it with plenty of spaghetti sauce as he made himself comfortable.  No one ever figured out why Bob decided to sit up in a tree for three days during the coldest days of winter and to my knowledge he never did it again.

I mentioned earlier that it was illegal to have a bobcat within the Omaha city limits and it’s still illegal today, 50 years later.  Mike’s family decided that they would simply ignore this statute since they originally thought Bob would just grow into a big barn cat rather than a ferocious apex predator.  I still think that the distinctive short tail should have been a pretty good clue, but I guess they either decided to ignore it or maybe they hoped that it would eventually grow out to be a regular domestic house cat tail.  At any rate, they licensed Bob as a domestic shorthair house cat, had him neutered, and got him all his shots as their vet suggested.  I don’t think the vet ever cautioned them about the differences between owning a regular domestic cat versus a bobcat.  I think he just ignored the situation and hoped that they would eventually hand Bob over to the zoo once he became hard to live with.  

Bob never showed any aggression whatsoever and basically acted just like a regular pet cat except for the feather incident and his larger size.  I spent many hours at Mike’s house with Bob curled up on the couch next to me sleeping and purring loudly.  Long after Mike had grown up and moved away we learned that Bob had passed away peacefully in his sleep one night.  We all felt a great sense of loss when we learned of Bob’s passing, but we knew he had had many wonderful years with Mike’s family and friends and had lived a great life.