Branchville (WLTX)- Some folks have decided to stay indoors after separate bobcat attacks leave two people injured. Wildlife officials say bobcat attacks are rare, especially in populated areas.
"I was dead, I was dead, there was no doubt in my mind that I knew I was dead," says Branchville resident Chuck Tuttle. He feels lucky to be alive after being mauled by a bobcat on his back porch.
"He just made one lunge and he was on top of me," says Tuttle. The wild animal left puncture wounds in his head and body. He needed nearly twenty stitches to close the wounds. Tuttle says if not for his wife's quick thinking, it could have been worse.
Janet Tuttle says she grabbed a mop and beat the animal off her husband. "I wouldn't let my husband sit there and be eaten by a wildcat," says Tuttle.
While she saved her husband, it was too late to save her pets. "We have a yellow cat with three kittens. He got those and killed all of them," says Tuttle.
The bobcat eventually took off into the woods. But hours later and just blocks away, Hugo Valentine says he too was attacked by a bobcat before he and some friends were able to kill the animal by suffocating it.
"It just all of a sudden latched onto my leg. I just reached over and grabbed it behind the ears," says Valentine. His friend Eddie Waters knew something had to be done. Had to hold it down and do something with it before it bit the rest of us," says Waters.
The Department of Health and Environmental Control says the bobcat tested positive for rabies. The first case reported in Orangeburg County this year.
Waters says he's worried for his neighbors. "It's pretty scary really because we got kids and everybody out here in our yards," says Waters.
Meanwhile Janet Tuttle is grateful to have her husband of thirty-six years still with her. Laughing as she talked about her husband she says, "I mean there's a lot of times I'd like to kill him but not like that," says Tuttle.
5/8/2009 11:20:36 PM
