Large Wildcat Caught on Game Camera Has a West Point Landowner Stumped

Jeff Kelly of West Point spotted a big cat in his hayfield several nights ago.

“(I) only got to see him for a few seconds before he darted off,” Kelly said. “I described it at the time as about the size of a juvenile (teenage) mountain lion. It was longer than a bobcat and had a head that appeared like a young mountain lion. It darted off at a 90 degree angle and was fast as a big cat in Africa.”

On Thursday, morning, Dec. 11, a security camera at his neighbor’s house captured the cat in his pasture.

“The game warden says it’s a house cat, but I’ve seen it and it’s bigger than Garfield,” Kelly said.

It appears to have a long tail, which precludes it from being a bobcat. And it doesn’t look big enough to be a mountain lion. Kelly posted this grainy photo from the security camera on the “Texas Black Panthers and Cougars: Evidence and Lore” Facebook page. Some of the group members suggest it may be an ocelot, a medium-sized wild cat native to Central and South America.

Ocelots once ranged throughout the southern U.S., but human development over the past few centuries has pushed them farther south. A 2019 analysis by Dr. Michael Tewes of Texas A&M University- Kingsville estimated there were about 50 individual ocelots living in Texas, but all of those are located close to the Rio Grande border.

Others on the Facebook page doubted that it was an ocelot, noting that ocelots are spotted and don’t have stripes like the ones that appear in the photo. Some thought it might be a Savannah cat, a breed of hybrid cat developed by crossing an African serval with a domestic cat.