Originally published at: Is the daycare-stalking Pittsburgh bobcat just a regular cat? | Boing Boing
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Aside from their…impeccable commitment to honesty in retractions… their website contains an infinite-scroll chumbox.
I’m not sure which is a more abject illustration of profound moral sickness.
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All cats are feral cats.
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Big ol Bobcat
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“this large looking cat” – that’s a journalist committed to the story
I know nothing about visually distinguishing between bobcats and housecats, but a quick web search tells me:
- Bobcats have spots. Cat in question does not appear to have spots.
- Bobcats tails are 2 to 8 inches long with black on top and white underneath. Maybe.
- Bobcats have black and white ears, with extra tufts of fur. I don’t see it.
- Bobcats are generally much larger and more muscular than house cats, ranging from a measely 14 pounds up to 40 pounds. From the video clips, I don’t get a good sense of scale.
I also learned that there’s a breed of housecat called a Pixie Bobcat, and the reference photo looks far more like a bobcat than the one in the video.
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I love Bobcat!
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$1000 for a cat!?
Wow.
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See also the mysterious Gahanna Lion Episode of '04. The sightings just sort of stopped after a while. I would bet money that the “lion” was a coyote.
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The original picture of “what she thought was a house cat” is very clearly… a house cat. I wonder if the “wildlife expect” who “confirmed” the bobcat only saw the footage of it walking away.
One helpful means of identifying bobcats is that their faces don’t look like those of house cats. So if the face looks exactly like a house cat, it’s a house cat. It’s kind of a giveaway.
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To be fair, the cat WPXI filmed was named Robert.
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Indeed, it is just that their hunting ground tends to be very domestic.
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A bobcat would be a lot less dangerous to those kids. House cats like to shit and piss in childrens’ sandboxes, where they deposit eggs of toxoplasma parasites which will infect those children and could make the way to their brains, where infections are associated with future incidence of depression and schizophrenia.
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Is there any way to know whether we’ve got toxo-on-the-brain other than by dying and then asking somebody to dissect our heads 
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Listening to the news report again, it’s clear the “expert” who identified it was a cop. The only thing the PA Game Commission said was “this is an extremely rare sight to see,” which could simply be them responding to her saying “hey, I think I saw a bobcat.”
The reporter then goes on to ask everyone if they are “worried” about it. A house cat. The PA Game Commission also told her bobcats (which this was clearly not) are “elusive, shy, and avoid people.” And a quick check of bobcat history shows very few attacks on humans and zero times a human has been killed (not even small children), so even if this HAD been a bobcat - which, again, it was not - there was no concern.
But I expect reporters to be this ridiculous most of the time.
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If you’re genuinely concerned about it, yes, there’s a simple blood test for it. There’s no reason to believe you have it or that it’s harmful however, if you have no symptoms and aren’t a pregnant person. A substantial percentage of the world carries it entirely asymptomatically, so it’s not something you should lose sleep over. Cats take all the heat for it, but there’s lots of ways to catch it in this world.
Incidentally, that whole “it makes you love cats” thing is a myth. There’s some evidence that it can affect the behaviour of rodents in a way that makes them more likely to be caught, but humans are way too complex for an effect such as the internet likes to say it has.
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