To the question “How do you get a bobcat out from the front grille of a car?” Portage County deputies and members of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources demonstrated the answer this week.
Portage County Sheriff Mike Lukas related the tale on his Facebook page, beginning with the call that came in on Tuesday evening.
“Ok this is a first, dispatch gets a caller stating, ‘I have a bobcat in my car’. You can only imagine what everyone was thinking at the time,” he wrote.
Being something different, he wrote, “numerous deputies were curious.”
“So, Deputies Selvey, Stanton and Ashbeck responded to the location to investigate. As you can imagine the shock they were in when [lo] and behold there was a bobcat in the vehicle,” he wrote.
The bobcat was not actually inside the passenger area of the car.
Not only did a bobcat in Wisconsin survive being hit by a car- it proceeded to get stuck in the vehicle’s grill.https://t.co/dk38VYHQ5g
— ABC News 4 (@ABCNews4) April 21, 2023
According to WSAW-TV, the drama began after the driver of the vehicle said that it sounded as if the car struck something.
Expecting to find a piece of road debris stuck on the car, the driver pulled off to the side of the road to investigate.
What the driver found was not debris, but a bobcat wedged in the space between the bumper and the front grille, which had been damaged by the impact.
Watch moment officers in the United States remove a bobcat from a car’s grille.
Watch more videos: https://t.co/8xyWy2d9Fw pic.twitter.com/omM1Big1Jh
— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 21, 2023
Lukas said his deputies “are really good at solving problems but this one baffled them so we called in reinforcements with Conservation Warden Bryan Lockman.”
“As you can see on the bodycam footage Warden Lockman was a pro at getting the critter out and in his truck and returned it to the wild,” he wrote.
Video shows the process of gingerly looping a rope around the bobcat’s neck with a very long animal-control catch pole.
“That’s a big one,” one of the rescuers said on the video.
As the bobcat occupied itself with attacking the pole, the game warden swung the animal into the back of a pickup truck and slammed the gate shut, trapping the animal inside.
“All in a day’s work at the Portage County Sheriff’s Office and the Wisconsin DNR,” Lukas wrote.
Lukas told WSAW that the animal was later returned to the wild and did not appear injured from its ordeal.
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