Mountie used broom sticks, a knife and a roll of duct tape to free bobcat stuck in Venetian blinds

When a wayward bobcat got caught up in some Venetian blinds a Canadian Mountie came up with a solution involving two broom sticks, a knife, and a roll of duct tape. The incident began on Friday afternoon in Nelson, British Columbia, when Leanne Kalabis, who has a young son and is five months pregnant, heard strange noises coming from her basement.



She caught a glimpse of a furry face and thought it might have been a lost domestic cat, but when she went downstairs with her dog to investigate, it turned out to be a wild one. "That's definitely not a house cat... that's definitely a bobcat," she recalled thinking. Her dog gave chase and got a little scratched up, and the bobcat then scaled a wall and made it to the top of a window, where it caught up in the blinds. Hissing and lunging for the dog, Kalabis said it became "quite entangled," and she decided to call for help.



"What do I do? I've got a bobcat in my basement," she said. She called over a neighbour, who agreed the bobcat was going nowhere fast, and then the Mounties. The RCMP officer who responded, Michael Stefani, had to improvise. "He initially thought maybe he could put a blanket over the bob cat and try to get it out this way. But realised quickly that it was very distraught and very vicious. Its claws were coming out and it was hissing," Kalabis said.


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"He very creatively thought to put two broomsticks together, tape them with duct tape, put his knife on the end and was able to, from a corner, get the stick close enough to the blinds where he could cut the blinds and free the bobcat," she said. The bobcat dropped from the cut blinds, ran at a few windows trying to get out, and then found the basement door and made it outside. Kalabis said the whole incident was very surreal, and that she will be double-checking that her basement door - which she thinks blew open earlier in the day - stays closed from now on.