Atlanta Woman Startled By Wild Cat (serval) in Her Bed
Atlanta Woman Startled By Wild Cat in Her Bed
Serval that wandered into house likely someone's illegal exotic pet
Atlanta Woman Startled By Wild Cat in Her Bed
(NEWSER) – David Frank woke up before 7 one morning last week and opened the back door for the dog. That was the last normal thing to happen that morning. His wife, Kristine, felt a cat—a really big cat—jump up on the bed. But the Franks don’t have a cat. What they did have was an open door for a cat to explore, and a wild serval did just that, the Marietta Daily Journal reports. The big, wild cat—servals are native to Africa and can stand a couple feet tall and weigh 30-40 pounds—had been spotted in their Atlanta neighborhood a few times before turning up on the Franks’ bed.
Kristine’s understandably startled reaction scared the cat off the bed. She was able to inch out of the room and close the door behind her, CNN reports. "Afterwards I was like, 'Was that a bobcat? Was it a leopard? Was it a baby? Was it a mom?'" Kristine said. While there is no federal law against keeping a serval as a pet, it is illegal in Georgia. And not just because it’s dangerous for humans. Alicia Prygoski of the Animal Legal Defense Fund said that wild cats like servals shouldn’t be kept in homes because there’s no room for them to exhibit their natural behaviors. Authorities are trying to catch the big cat and take it to a sanctuary.
https://www.newser.com/story/308183/atlanta-woman-startled-by-wild-cat-in-her-bed.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_world_login
“I felt something jump on my bed, and I opened my eyes and it was a large cat on my bed,” Kristine said. “… I didn’t realize how big it was at the time, but it did jump off the bed. It was terrifying. When I looked, it was as tall as my bed, so I could see its head and ears. That’s when I knew it was not a normal house cat. I just froze and yelled for my husband. I said, ‘That’s not a cat and I don’t know what it is.’”
David then came into the bedroom and “locked eyes” with the serval, she said, and he told her to slowly get out of the bed and leave the bedroom. Once she did, he exited the room an closed the door. David then went around to the back of the house, where a door from the bedroom leads out to a deck, and opened that door to let the serval out.
As the cat exited the bedroom onto the deck and went down the deck stairs to the back yard, it hissed at David, who later took pictures of it.
https://www.mdjonline.com/neighbor_newspapers/exotic-cat-on-the-loose-in-atlanta-after-jumping-on-sleeping-woman-s-bed/article_6b7b8118-dad0-11eb-9205-afc9ac1bb2fd.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
The one would have completely freaked me out, but several would have given me a heart-attack! 
Sigh.
I hope the importer is found and prosecuted.
