I laughed out loud when my wife showed me this video clip on X.com. It's a lady calling her bobcat kitten (named "Murder", of all things!) to come and play with her. The result is very funny, as well as cute. Cat lovers will enjoy it immensely. Click over there to watch it for yourselves.
No, I do not want to raise a bobcat kitten of my own. My fingers (and other body parts) are shrinking at the thought of those claws!
Peter
16 comments:
Well, if you're going to be a cat lady, be a CAT lady . . .
The link goes to an x account that has a picture of the video, but not a link to it. The image is just an image and you can't play it from there. Do you have the link to the actual video for those of us without X accounts?
Bobcats can top out at 30plus pounds. Feline puberty will get ugly.
The link does go to the video. I suspect you've got some security measure(s) on your computer and/or browser that are not letting it play. It works for me, and for the other commenters here. Sorry about that.
Bob and Mrs. Robert live at the mine and with their litters, they're incredible mousers/ratters. I used to leave a bowl of milk for them daily, often with a cracked egg in it. Then Bob & the Mrs. vanished and I noticed mountain lion tracks in the snow near the milk bowl. I discontinued feeding, the lions moved on. Bob & Mrs. returned along with the fox family that live about 100 yards away in a den of their own. No more squirrels. The coati mundi family moved on a long time ago.
This happened to me, too. Just mouse up to the left hand corner of your monitor screen and click on the refresh the screen symbol. Then it will work. When the video begins, mouse down onto the sound symbol and click it on. [She talks about the experience and the animal, etc.]
At one level I think anonymous has it right. Once it starts making a Maine Coon look tiny it's not going to be fun. And yet that is one enthusiastically happy bobcat the purring is incredible. And I bet it would with the local Squirrel (aka Tree Rat) population in a trice. I'm pretty sure its easier to get a license for concealed carry in Massachusetts than for a Bobcat :-) .
I remember a truck pulling up to the pumps in Idaho and some furry felines wanted to know what the skinny white kid was doing to the truck. I was informed they were friendly but I still gave them a wide berth.
And I like cats. Just not big enough to win any arguements.
Being so "mouthy" is not a good sign for the future.
We have a tort that is a bit like that.. Not bobcat. she is about 6 or 7 months now and loves to hug neck and crawl on shoulders.. getting a bit big for it though. She puts up with me and youngest daughter and loves mom and oldest daughter. Actually if she had to chose it would be oldest daughter hands down.
I'm a cat and dog person... over my life i have been comfortable meeting and handling animals that others wouldn't go near. Visited a distant cousin many years ago and he had a cat that was at least 30 to 40 lbs... it was huge. Conformation wise he looked like a common short hair American house cat. yellow with faint white stripes. did not have maincoon or bobcat features. So he was pretty friendly but cousin did warn me not to push him if he wasn't receptive. He was receptive and then crawled into my lap and demanded pets. He didn't move on and if I stopped petting him started growling at me or took a paw and placed my hand back on his body. By the time dinner came around everyone was laughing at me as I was seriously captive. Cousin had to come over and get him to leave me alone. He was very gentle with me other than the very convincing growl anytime I didn't do exactly what he wanted. That large of a cat in your lap when it growls at you definitely gets your attention. Those damn claws were at least an inch long or longer. One of his paws was a little larger than half my palm. A memory that will always stay with me.
Sigh... and predictably, the comments are stupid...
My daughters are lobbying me to separate a bobcat kitten from its mother and to deliver it as a pet. There is a big difference between a wild animal and a domesticated animal... Despite my cautionary notes they may go around me.
Thats not good. I have a friend that is as bad as steve irwin was. And has a massive ammount of rips, punctures, poisonings and scars to prove it. Even if raised totally by people in a loving environment they still have the hard wired instincts. We get away with making common house cats pets only because the mostly are to small to seriuosly damage us. We all have the scars from them though. Scratches and punctures from panicked flight from your arms or just bent bad temper atack a hand or leg. Once to head north of 20lbs and start hitting 30 40 or 5050lbs it starts getting serious.
We had a cat that may have been part bobcat. He was a short hair grey tiger stripe in appearance but his tail was shorter than a normal domestic plus at his biggest he weighed about 26 lbs. His vocalizations sounded very much like a bobcat's and not your normal house cat. We knew that because where we lived out in the country we could hear bobcats at night.
We think that he was the offspring of a feral domestic female and a male bobcat. He wandered up to our backdoor late one night as a little kitten meowing loudly. My wife fed him and he lived with us 15 years until we had to have him put to sleep because of health problems. He was a gentle giant who liked to lay in your lap.
Not the same anonymous as before, but that lady is asking for trouble. Yes, the cat is having fun, but unless it's declawed -utterly cruel and inhumane - you should not encourage a cat to play like this with your bare skin. It's bad enough in a domestic kitten, once they reach adulthood and are haven't learned humans aren't toys, they can do serious damage without meaning to.
I have spent a lot of time with cats between my own, cat sitting, and friends' cats. I have met ONE cat I would trust to wrestle with my bare skin and even he slipped up occasionally.
That bobcat is going to get rougher and rougher, even if he is neutered. If he is, miraculously, an exception, then shoeing it off on the internet is going to make others think they can do the same thing. Someone is going to get hurt, and the animal is usually the one who pays for it.
original anonymous here :) I was on phone when i posted last and it didn't identify me correctly.
To prove the point we are making I now have holes in my leg from our "call it a tween age cat/kitten". I was sitting in the lazyboy reading a book and she was affectionately laying in my lap. The dog laying about 36 inches away, talked to me or her. Not sure who.. but it wasn't a bark or an aggressive anything, just his normal whine/groan/noise he uses to talk with. Which in the course of him doing so the cat freaked, lost her balance laying in my lap and used at least a couple paw fulls of claws to, one stabilize her position, and then launch herself in imitation of a rail gun projectile, in a random direction away from me and the dog. Consequences, I am bleeding and have a week or so of scabs and such to live through before it heals totally.
Honestly this is no different than owning horses. They are large powerful animals that are prey critters that have hard coded genetics to startle and jump, buck run away from a leaf that reflects light they were not anticipating. Love horses but they are dangerous by virtual of their size, strength and random panics in close proximity to them. We judge that an ok tradeoff for their utility and for many their affectionate relationships with people that like them. Being aware and compensating reduces some of the risk but not all of it. just in the united states 65,000 to 100,000 people are injured and treated in hospitals annually. Roughly 100 of those incidents result in death every year.
I love horses, have ridden horses, have let my children have lessons on horses etc... but there is a risk. Where on your scale of utility you place the risk to you and yours for what type of animal it is and whether that crosses a line needs to be carefully considered. We have 20lb and less cats, We probably would have horses if I had the resources to do so. The closest I will get to have a non domesticated animal living in our house is the aforementioned common house cat. Which truly isn't domesticated, it is considered semi-domesticated. It is no different than its wild cousins other than it learned it could feed well on the mice and rats that follow humans around where they live and then found that I could if it played sorta nice get the silly humans to let it live indoors and feed it really nice food and pet it until it needed to teach the human a lesson in who is boss.
Statistics for common house cat is estimated 400,000 bites and 66,000 hospital visits from injuries sustained. Only around 10,000 of those are trip and fall injuries from subtle cat assassination techniques of walking under foot or winding their cute little bodies around your legs.
actually this cdc link makes trip and fall much higher for cats and dogs together and dogs accounting for 88% of incidents.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5811a1.htm
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