Big cat. Cougar in my yard last night
8480-8490 Alder Way, Blaine, WA
(The city says Blaine, but it’s actually Birch Bay.)
The address is a couple of streets away. There have been cougars sighted in the general area (as close as a mile away), but not in this neighbourhood. The shape of the head does look like a cougar, but the colour looks too dark to be a cougar. In my mind, cougars are blonde. Someone posted it looks like an ocelot, but we don’t have up those here.
Can any cat experts give a positive ID?
ETA: It looks like the cat was spotted at Alder St. and Cedar Ave., at the corner of an unimproved park. (i.e., the park is an area that was left in its natural state.)
Yeah, I was gonna suggest an escaped pet, but then I remembered that young cougars do have some darker patterns. However, pulling up a photo shows it doesn’t really match what you’ve linked. So I’m gonna second an escaped ocelot or a hoax.
I made a cursory search on whether it’s legal to own an ocelot here. The law prohibits ‘Family felidae, only lions, tigers, captive-bred cougars, jaguars, cheetahs, leopards, snow leopards, and clouded leopards.’ No ocelots on the list. (Interestingly, the law also prohibits owning a rhinoceros.)
I don’t believe people up here would hoax like that. (Some tend to share political hoaxes.) If someone’s pet ocelot escaped, I’d think there’d be a post about it. The foliage in the picture looks like up here.
It could also be a domestic cat, or some kind of hybrid. There are a number of domestic cat varieties purposefully bred to look like ocelots or other wild cats.
I doubt it. The Ocicat, which is not a cross between a domestic cat and an ocelot but a cross between two domestic breeds, doesn’t look like the animal in the photo.
Trust me, it’s an ocelot. I see no reason to think it’s anything else.
I think the only reasonable hypothesis is that someone in the area had a pet ocelot illegally and it escaped. There’s no way it wandered up from Arizona; even there ocelots are very rare.
Arguing against a hoax is that the person who posted the photo identified it as a cougar. If someone lost an ocelot being kept illegally, they certainly wouldn’t post about it. It would be asking if anyone found your lost drugs,
Escaped is one possibility. Another is that someone intentionally released a pet ocelot into the wild when they realized they don’t make good pets. That would explain the lack of “missing ocelot” notices.
The facial markings certainly do look like an Ocelot. It is possible that it could be a Bobcat, they have similar but less distinct facial markings. Too bad the picture isn’t better quality that could show if it has a tail. Tail would confirm Ocelot, stubby little tail then it would be a Bobcat.
