A Georgia woman lived a scene straight out of a screwball comedy film — but she certainly wasn’t laughing about it!
Kristine Frank, a resident of Atlanta’s Brookhaven neighborhood, recently woke up to a shocking sight: a wild African cat was chilling beside her in bed.
The woman recounted the scary incident with WXIA, telling the outlet she found a serval — a wild cat native to Africa sometimes kept as an exotic pet (pictured above) — inches away from her. Frank said the animal was over two feet tall with pointy ears and spots, and explained it got into her home when she let her dog outside in the middle of the night.
She remembered:
“I yell for my husband and yell. ‘Dave, that is not a cat!’ So, he comes in the room, and I’m just in bed freaking out. He locked eyes with the cat, and the cat was kind of cornered. So, I slowly got out of the bed and tippy-toed out, and my husband was able to get the cat out of the house.”
OMG, how scary! We can’t even imagine!
Related: Dog Owner Finds Pet Dead After ‘Sitter’ Stops Responding
After her husband successfully shooed the animal out of the house, the couple called animal control, which told Frank to contact the Department of Natural Resources to launch an investigation.
So, how did this wild cat find its way to ATL in the first place? The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) told WXIA a local resident is likely keeping the serval as a pet — despite the fact that such an arrangement is illegal in the state of Georgia.
As for Frank, she’s just grateful that no one was harmed by the feline intruder. She said:
“I just think if my dog would have been in the house, what would have happened to my dog? If I had small children, what would have happened to them?”
We shudder to think…
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case, and the serval cat was eventually humanely trapped in a neighbor’s backyard. ALDF senior legislative affairs manager Alicia Prygoski explained the animal would be placed in a sanctuary where it would live its best life, sharing on Twitter:
“We’ve offered to place the serval in a sanctuary where she will get adequate care, proper nutrition, and the space she needs to thrive and exhibit a lot of those natural behaviors that are impossible in private homes… Wild cats are not meant for private possession. We need federal laws — like the #BigCatPublicSafetyAct —to keep wild cats out of homes and beds!”
Preach!
The org echoed that sentiment to WXIA, with a rep saying:
“The message here is just that wild cats are not supposed to be pets, and they can be a danger to a community and surrounding neighborhoods.”
It’s crazy something like that even needs to be said, but hopefully legislatures get the memo so incidents like this (or even worse incidents) won’t happen again!
[Image via NatGeo]
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