Story at a glance
- Home security footage of a bobcat attack has gone viral.
- A bobcat can be seen attacking a couple in North Carolina on their driveway.
- The animal was killed and later tested positive for rabies.
What would you do if a bobcat attacked? Now, one woman knows that her husband would come to her aid.
A viral video, caught via a home security camera, shows the moment when a bobcat attacked a North Carolina woman and her husband.
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As the video begins, Happy Wade can be seen carrying a tray of brownies out to his car and musing that he needs to get it washed. When his wife, Kristi Wade, enters the view toting their cat in a carrier, a growl is heard as a bobcat emerges and launches at Wade.
Kristi Wade then screams, “Oh my God! It’s a bobcat!” The animal bites her as she struggles to hold on to the carrier before her husband rushes over and wrangles the bobcat off of her. He can then be seen struggling with the animal, holding it at arms-length as it scratches and bites at him, then tossing the bobcat across his yard.
As a neighbor passing by runs over to see what is going on, Wade yells he’s going to shoot it, along with a string of expletives, as he chases it off-screen, and the video ends.
The Pender County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Wade did shoot and kill the animal and that testing confirmed the bobcat was rabid and would have been euthanized.
The Wades were both bitten and scratched during the incident and received antibiotics and the rabies vaccine.
“Any rabid animal is going to be far more aggressive around humans,” Ted Stankowich, a behavioral ecologist at California State University, Long Beach, told the New York Times. “But a normal bobcat would typically not come into a neighborhood like that, into suburbia, let alone attack a person.”
The footage of the ordeal has received more than 12 million views online.
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