It's a good thing Cincinnati Zoo employees had yet to see Cocaine Bear when they took in an exotic feline who'd gotten into the drug. Animal control officials were called to retrieve the African serval, a medium-sized cat, from a tree after he escaped from his owner's car during the man's arrest in Cincinnati on Jan. 28, per WLWT and People. "Hindsight being 20/20, it probably would have involved a whole lot more people," Ray Anderson of Cincinnati Animal CARE tells WXIX, noting the serval—which can jump up seven feet high—"didn't want to get out of the three" and officials didn't want to lose the cat, whose leg was inadvertently broken during the capture.
Making the story even stranger, rescuers later learned they'd wrangled a serval that had been exposed to cocaine. Once whisked to a care facility, the 35-pound cat was given toxicology tests that showed the presence of the drug. "I don't know if it was environmental or experimental," says Anderson. Either way, "this cat could've shredded us apart and killed us," Troy Taylor, chief of the Hamilton County Dog Warden's Office, tells WKRC.
Hamilton County officials considered charging Amiry's owner, as it's illegal to keep a serval in Ohio, People reports. "But everybody was very cooperative in this case, and we didn't feel it was necessary," Anderson tells WXIX. Amiry continues to recover at the zoo, where he was taken shortly after his capture. "He's doing well" but "will likely be behind the scenes for a while," a zoo rep said Tuesday. "The next step will be for our Cat Ambassador Program team to work with him and determine if he's a good fit to be an ambassador animal." The CAP program teaches the importance of wild cat predators, though Amiry could potentially impart the dangers of drug use, too. (More exotic animals stories.)
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