Arizona Man Finds Live Bobcat Behind the Front Grill of His Car

Arizona has one of the highest bobcat densities in the Western U.S.
Arizona has one of the highest bobcat densities in the Western U.S.

The morning commute for an Arizona man turned scratch-your-eyes-out crazy recently. The unidentified man heard an unusual noise under his hood when he arrived at work and put his car in park. The noise belonged to a bobcat the driver didn’t know he had hit on his way in.

“He looked under the hood and saw two eyeballs looking at him,” posted Maricopa County Sherriff’s Office.

The collision happened in Gila Bend, Arizona in May but photos of the scene didn’t surface until July. One of the images shows the trapped cat laying inside the engine area, alert, while looking out through the hard, plastic mesh frame of the vehicle’s front grill.

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KOLD reports that Arizona Game & Fish Department sedated the wild animal before pulling it out of the grill. It was then released back into the wild, surprisingly, with no injuries.

Read Next: Watch a Game Warden Remove a Bobcat Trapped Behind the Grille of a Toyota Sedan

Even crazier, this isn’t the first stray cat caught in a car this year. In April, another bobcat was found inside a front bumper in Wisconsin. That cat wasn’t sedated when it was extracted. As this body cam shows, it came out swinging while being moved by conservation officers from car engine to truck bed with a long, firm-handled catch pole. It too was returned to the wild uninjured.