This is what you take away from the story:
Phillips responded, “I normally carry, but as fast as this cat moved, I would have never made it to the holster.
Remember: the attacker always has the advantage. When you carry situational awareness is at least as important as being armed. She should have brandished as soon as the cat appeared.
As a teen I had to choke out a bobcat that had latched onto my fathers arm. That was a handful and I wasn’t even the one under attack.
Props to this granny for having the fight despite the pain!
It sounds like she was attacked within a few seconds of the cat’s appearance. Bobcats aren’t all that big or common, so if I saw one I wouldn’t automatically assume it was about to attack me. And there’s a reason we have the expression “catlike reflexes.”
Sounds like she’s tough and lucky, other than the $10k rabies shots.
That’s the problem, not all bobcats are criminals so how would she know for sure?
I’ve been in many, many situations like this (not rabid animals but potentially threatening ones). As soon as “strange predator-looking animal” appears: my hand is on my sidearm. Maybe she wasn’t in the practice of doing that. I’ll give her a pass on not having the same mindset as me because it’s probably her first encounter with something like this. Not saying the cat wouldn’t have gotten a few bites and scratches on me, too, but it would have done so while eating 9mm pills.
Lolz, I too have strangled a bobcat. Thought I joined some sort of exclusIve club that day but I guess it’s not all that uncommon. Mine was making progress on getting away from me while my forearms began to burn. Dispatched the critter with a quick slice from the delica.
Bravo, granny, bravo.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Bobcat_Lynx_rufus_distribution_map.png
See the midwestern donut hole with no bobcats? That’s where I grew up and have lived 99% of my life. I had no idea bobcats were common elsewhere in the USA. I was more aware of the javelina, even though it lives even farther from here!
It also looks like these are fox/coyote sized, so without having had any experience around them, I would not have realized they were a significant threat to humans. Learn something new every day, especially with people posting on this thread that they have personally had to kill them after being attacked.
She had a camera in her hands at the time and sounds like she got two seconds to transition from “Hey a Bobcat” to “fight.” And it always helps when grandma is only 46 years old, I remember when grandmas were more like 64.
Around here, bobcats have been known to wander well into suburban neighborhoods.
Apparently she had time to take a picture of the bobcat.
when she saw the bobcat and snapped a picture of it.
“As soon as I took picture, it charged me and leaped for my face,” she said
Lessee…that requires lifting the camera to your face, getting the bobcat centered in the viewfinder, holding steady, and pressing the “take picture” button. I’m guessing that takes a few seconds. She maybe could have used those seconds to unholster her weapon and stand at the ready?
Again, a person not practicing situational awareness might have thought, “Wow. A bobcat. I gotta get a picture of that.” Someone who doesn’t regularly run across potentially dangerous wild animals might not have immediately snapped to a defensive posture.
Put another way:
What if the attacker had been a person dressed in some sort of costume, but holding a knife. Would this grandma have thought, “Wow. Cute costume. I gotta get a picture of that”? No, she would have seen the knife first and at least put her hand on her weapon.
The fact that it was an animal (to my thinking) elicited a “cute kitty” response instead of “uh-oh, dangerous animal” response.
I know for a fact that donut hole is not accurate. Missouri is full of Bobcats.
We have foxes, and raccoons all over our area. We live pretty much in the middle of town, adjacent to the fairly large campus of our community college. See the foxes and racoons regularly at night. We have outside cats and I feed them early in the day to lessen the probability of feeding the raccoon’s. On occassion someone will tell me they’ve seen a bobcat. I’ve never seen one in town.
Man I must be getting old. I read the headline “grandma chokes out bobcat” and I am thinking, you know, a sweet, ELDERLY grandma. Nope, “46 year old woman”… Anyway, kudos to her for having the fortitude to take care of business.
I feel kinda bad about this.
I think it’s because it’s been kinda hot and humid outside and I’ve been a little stressed running back to the house for water all day.
I thought it would go away, but no, I keep hearing that song in my head.
“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”
Unless you’ve been up close to a Bobcat, it’s difficult to imagine that much fight in something weighing 15-20 lbs.
46 or 65 any woman that’s got the presence of mind and that much fight in her is a hell of a gal.
BTW, they don’t taste bad, but they’re a bit chewy. Bobcats, not Grandma’s.
Definitely props but not all grannies are “grannies”.
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Sometimes it’s amazing the regional differences that never occur to you until something random like this. I’ve seen a bobcat once in my life, in the UP, at midnight-thirty (12:30am) on a remote highway through designated wilderness, 50+ miles from anything resembling a subdivision. But apparently they just roam around like deer and raccoons in other parts of the country (all of Michigan has deer and raccoons in abundance). Like I said, learn something new every day. (There is no attitude, this is meant literally.)
When was that? Back in the day, women were having kids well before 20 all the time, especially in farm country.
My parents go married when my mom was 19. At 21 I was born and my grandma was 44 at the time. My grandma married when she was in her early 20s and had my mom 9 months later. Her mother, my great grandma, was in her early 40s. My great grandma had 2 kids by the time she was in her early 20s
My cousin married and had kids when he was 22. Her oldest is 15 now and my aunt isn’t 60 yet.
Marry early, have kids right away…was pretty common.
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