Family say that heroic cat alerted them to rabid bat

A family from the Arlington Heights suburb of Chicago, Illinois, has needed to spend a lot of time at the doctor’s office lately, after finding an uninvited guest in their home. But things could have been a lot worse, if not for their cat, Wilson.



“We fell asleep listening to a TED Talk on hallucinations,” Julianna Cucci said. In the dead of night Wilson pawed his masters awake. “My husband was swinging a pillow around the room, kneeling on my bed,” Cucci said. “He was saying, ‘Shut the door! Grab the cat! There’s a bat! There’s a bat! There’s a bat!’



“I thought that he was having an hallucination. I had no idea what was wrong,” Cucci said. Her husband was doing battle with a little brown bat. “I shut the door, and I hear ‘baboom, baboom, baboom,’” Cucci said. “It sounded like the bat took on a human form.” The family was able to capture the bat in a box, only to find out it later tested positive for rabies.


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As a precaution, the family has been undergoing a series of five shots. “It really was just like a flu shot. It was not a big deal,” Cucci said. She said the family is especially thankful Wilson was on the prowl that night. “He was doing what any cat would do, especially a cat raised in a barn. He saw a bat and he was after it,” Cucci said. “Bats do a great service for our whole ecosystem. You just don’t want them in your house.”