We Share Our Home With Three Bobcats

Yes, you read that right. My husband, Mick, and I have three pet bobcats in our home. We have never been known to take the “normal path” in the things we do and our choice of pets is no different.

Why bobcats?

When Mick was a kid, he found a baby bobcat rolling around in the hay in a barn. Not knowing what it was, he took it home to keep as a pet. He and the bobcat grew to have a very close relationship. Mick remembers this bobcat very fondly and has always told himself that if he ever had the opportunity to have a pet bobcat again he would do it. And now we have three bobcats named Cairo and MONACO and Rio. We got Gypsy in January of 2018 and MONACO about two months later. Most recently Rio joined our family a few months ago 2020.

What do they eat?

We feed Cairo, MONACO, and Rio once a day in the mornings. They get a fresh mix of raw chicken, steak, shrimp, salmon, and pork (expensive tastes!). We tried hamburger meat but they were not a fan of that. Our bobcats typically go for meats with heavier fats. We put a supplement on top of their food that has bits of bone marrow, feathers, fur, and other things they would naturally ingest in the wild.

What is having a bobcat like?

Mick and I have owned a variety of other pets. We’ve had dogs, cats, etc. but nothing compares to our bobcats. You have to really work for their respect but once you get it, there’s this amazing tight bond that you can’t get with any other animal. Bobcats are known to live between twenty and thirty years in captivity so we are in it for the long haul.

Bobcats love hard and they play hard. They have very strong jaws and sometimes bite harder than you are expecting. Bruises and scratches (maybe a couple of broken bones in your hand) are all just part of the territory of sharing your home with a bobcat. It’s all playful, they’ve never bitten us or hurt us out of anger.

They’re very neat and tidy animals. They don’t damage the house at all and they actually use the bathroom in the toilet (how cool!). This is a natural instinct for bobcats from the wild to hide their scent so the toilet is their preferred place to go to the bathroom. And that works really well for us!

Sharing your home with a bobcat is not for everyone but we’ve always done things that are a bit off the beaten path. We love our Cairo, MONACO and our newest addition Rio couldn’t imagine our life without them.