A Calgary woman was sent to hospital Monday morning after a bobcat ran at her and attacked while she was walking her dog in front of her home in the southeast. It happened shortly after 10 a.m. in the community of Parkland. “As soon as I opened the door, (the bobcat) ran toward the alley and it attacked the woman,” said neighbour Mike Melanson, who witnessed the incident after he first noticed the bobcat sitting on the grass in his front yard. “She went down and she was screaming. I could hear her screaming. I saw the attack. “It jumped right on her.” Calgary police and paramedics were called, and the woman was taken to hospital for minor cuts and scratches, EMS say. Fish and Wildlife officers spent hours in the area setting up cages and traps but left early in the afternoon without capturing the bobcats. Fish and Wildlife returned to Parkland Monday evening. Neighbours say the bobcat has been in the area for months and had a litter of four kittens living under a deck for the past five weeks. As of late Monday afternoon, the bobcat could still regularly be seen on the street, searching for food and going into different yards near where the attack occurred. “Very, very unusual. In my years in the city of Calgary, the only time we’ve had bobcats contact humans has been when they feel cornered or threatened,” said Acting Staff Sgt. Lorne Rinkel with Fish and Wildlife Enforcement Services in Calgary. An investigation is still underway, and Rinkel said wildlife officers could still return to the area after speaking to more witnesses and the victim. “When a human is contacted by wildlife, especially what we call dangerous wildlife, we have to balance out our course of action. So do we want to euthanize or live trap or just leave things as they are?” Rinkel said. “So in this case, the mother’s left the scene with one kitten, and there’s still two under the deck. And I’m very confident that the mother will return shortly to pick up the remaining.” Neighbours say they phoned the city’s 311 service and were referred to Fish and Wildlife after raising concerns about the bobcat around pets and young children. “We were told you have to cohabitate, unless the humans are involved, which happened today, I guess,” said Monty Hans, whose backyard deck the bobcats have been living under for months. “The (mother bobcat) has been hunting by herself. And then the kittens stay under the deck and she comes back with something, drags it under the deck. We have made noise and kind of banged around and tried to get them to leave, but they’re not going, and it just wasn’t going anywhere. She wasn’t afraid of us." But some of the people who live in the area are not satisfied with the response from wildlife officials, especially now that a human has been injured. Some neighbours bought horns and bells on Monday to try to deter the bobcats from coming back. “But since we knew that it had a big litter, we are all taking precautions … putting extra lighting in the yard, cleaning up after our dogs right away, keeping them leashed, not letting pets by themselves in the backyard,” said Desiree Prosser, who lives across the alley from where the bobcats have been living. “And it’s tough. It’s not easy because it’s so unexpected and they’re so unpredictable. “It’s very, very scary. Like, could it be me? I was going to walk my dog 15 minutes earlier, and I didn’t, and that’s when it all happened.”
