This is an interesting cat picture. It shows two employees of Animal Protection Services of North Las Vegas with the police in attendance capturing and holding a young serval using what appears to be aluminium animal catch poles. The serval of course is very distressed. It is illegal to keep a serval in North Las Vegas. The owner, Kat Bailey, was unaware of this. She bought the cat from a California breeder five years ago. Kat Bailey kept the animal is an enclose. She does not know how the serval escaped. The serval is 5 years old and called Draco.
They found the serval near Ann and Clayton according to the NLVPD tweet on Twitter.
- Serval Cat Escapes
- Another African Serval Escapes and Gets Run Over
- Serval owner faces 21 criminal charges after cat escapes and attacks dog
They were happy with their work. The big question is what happened and what will happen next? I have to guess because there is no news on those topics. It is almost certain that the serval was a pet cat. A domesticated wild cat. Servals are often domesticated to be pets. Although they make poor pets. I have seen on declawed and abandoned at a breeders because the owner failed to cope. I would hope the cat is returned to the owner but how will they cope when they have not coped before?
There are numerous examples of servals escaping from their home which often is someone’s house (see links above). The cat becomes restless and escapes. Serval escapes are not that unsual. They are bound to cause problems because it is incongruous seeing a medium sized wild cat wandering around a major city like Las Vegas.
Years ago I wrote about serval escapes. It is very sad because the cat is utterly confused and anxious while the ‘owner’ is also anxious if they genuinely wanted to provide a home for the cat.
Keeping a serval as a pet seems to me to be a non-funtioning arrangement. It might work sometimes if the owner has lots of experience in caring for wild cats together with the time and money but such people are scarce.
The typical American citizen will find living with serval almost impossible even if they love cats. And it seems to me too that it is almost impossible to keep a serval inside a home. The amount of space they need is a thousand times larger. They need ten square kilometers not ten square meters.
Some comments from observers:
“American demand for this animal shame on this country and its demand for wild cats they belong to where it came from put in jail whoever paid for this voiceless animal to come to USA this is disgusting” – Gabriella Cicarelli
“Poor baby must be terrified! Hope it is rehomed..not destroyed because of buyers negligence and ignorance of such a beautiful intelligent animal.” – Cindy Hurd
This is the tweet (sometimes these stop functioning over time and if this has happened I apologise):
So who let the cat out of the bag. It’s not often you see a serval 🐱, which is a wild cat native to Africa, in North Las Vegas 👀.
Great job to #NLVPD Animal Protection Services! They found this little kitty near Ann and Clayton. #Cat #WildCat #Serval #Police #APS pic.twitter.com/dFrJchF8mW
— NLVPD (@NLVPD) February 9, 2021