WINDSOR — When Mike Peabody heard a noise outside his home unlike any he’d heard before, he figured his cat was involved. But as he followed the commotion into his house, he encountered a different sort of feline.
“I ran into the bathroom thinking I was going to be breaking up a cat fight,” Peabody said. “But then I saw it was a bobcat.”
Peabody, 69, was standing in his yard on Central Street in Windsor around 11 a.m. Friday when the incident began.
The wild animal had cornered his cat, Grayson, in the bathroom, and kept lunging toward the pet, threatening its jugular.
Acting fast, Peabody kicked the bobcat, he said, saving his cat.
“When I kicked it, it was really fast. It was on my knee with its claws. And as I was backing up, then it was coming at me with its jaw,” he said in an interview at his home on Monday.
After the initial charge, the bobcat backed off, and Peabody trapped it inside his bathroom, fastening the door shut with rope.
The bobcat punctured his knee to the bone, Peabody said, and he was transported by ambulance to Mount Ascutney Hospital and Health Center.
David Lockerby, a game warden, responded to the incident. The bobcat was euthanized by game wardens, he said, and later tested positive for rabies.
He said it was highly unusual for a bobcat to interact with and attack humans.
“That’s something that, you know, I may never see again in my career,” he said.
But Lockerby said he has recently received more reports of bobcat sightings. During the spring, the predators are likely to be hungry from the winter, he said, and more aggressive in their search for food.
“But certainly a situation where one is chasing a house cat in a very busy area like the middle of Windsor, and chasing one right into a house — that’s not normal behavior,” Lockerby said. He added that people should call Fish & Wildlife if they see a bobcat — or any wild animal — acting strange.
When Windsor Police Chief Jennifer Frank arrived on the scene, she said she could see the bobcat through a bathroom window. The animal had a “strong odor of skunk,” and Frank said it could have contracted rabies through contact with a skunk.
Col. Jason Batchelder, the state’s head game warden, said an average of one or two bobcats are euthanized a year in Vermont.
One was killed two towns north in Hartford in December 2018 after it bit two people and charged a game warden, the Valley News reported. It later tested positive for rabies.
On Monday, Peabody was headed back to Mount Ascutney Hospital for more rabies shots. Grayson has to quarantine inside for 45 days, but Peabody’s just glad the bobcat didn’t kill his “delicious-looking cat.”
