In writing for my website over 15 years, a thread runs through American society in respect of exotic pets and that is the keeping of the African serval; a high percentage of which are compelled to escape the confinements of their home and wander around urban and countryside environments frightening the neighbours to the point where quite often the police are involved and the animal is shot!
That was a long sentence which for me sums up the major problem of keeping a serval as a pet. There are other negative spin-offs which I briefly touch on below.
I’m prompted to write this article because yet another story of an escaped serval has made the headlines. It comes from Missouri, USA. No criticism is intended but Americans do have the greatest desire of all the world’s populations to own exotic pets. I hope other countries like China don’t follow suit. It is a bad habit but America does lead the way very often in many areas of society.
The news media don’t know how this serval ended up wandering around the Missouri countryside but “a crazy looking cat” was spotted by Missouri farmers over the past months. They had no idea what it was until an expert told them that it was a serval which had survived a harsh winter and which was captured thankfully without any problems.
The animal is now safe at a nearby sanctuary which I believe is the Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge.
There were signs of the serval’s presence when farmers found feathers and bones in their barns. They caught the serval in a trap and took it to a veterinarian for an examination. He or she determined that it was female and about three years of age. There was no microchip.
They couldn’t identify the owner. They called the refuge which was about two hours away in the neighbouring state of Arkansas. This is a pet serval and therefore domesticated. It must have been fairly easy to handle.
Pet servals are a bit like very large exotic domestic cats except their behaviour is not like that of a domestic cat. In the wild they have large home ranges of perhaps 20 kmΒ² or more which they claim as their own through marking territory by spraying urine and scratching the ground.
When they are confined to a human home which they must be or in an enclosure, they also spray urine because they’re going to be anxious, mixing as they are with humans and been confined to an area a tiny fraction of their natural space.
And this leads to, indeed compels them, to escape. They find a way. Of all the exotic pets, the serval is the one which has escaped the most. You could count the number of stories of escaped servals in news media if you wanted to kill a couple of hours of your time. The number will be quite big perhaps around 20 over the past 10 years in the US. There are some more examples of serval escapes at the end of this article.
In some states the serval is banned or you will need a licence to keep one. In other states they have a more laissez-faire attitude towards exotic pets and they will be allowed without any regulations but that’s unlikely. It all depends where you live but, in my view, they should be banned on a federal basis across the entirety of the USA.
My mind immediately turns to the Big Cat Public Safety Act which was recently enacted at a federal level by the US government and which was promoted by Carole Baskin of Big Cat Rescue. That act prevents people from keeping big cats as pets and in private zoos where they were abused. Many of them found their way to Carole Baskin’s rescue.
I would hope that the next campaign she runs will be to protect the serval from human excesses and to keep this elegant medium-sized wild cat species from becoming an unnatural, and an unsatisfactory pet.
I almost forgot another negative consequence: people who own servals often declaw them because they are frightened of their large claws. A terrible admission of failure in this entire process. A cruel act by ignorant people driven to possess a beautiful creature in a self-indulgent way without the ability to provide for that animal anywhere near properly. It’s time to stop it, all of it.
