In recent years, in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, there have been almost more reports of big cats than UFOs. Panther, cougar, lioness… Most of the time, searches to capture these wild beasts yielded nothing and the excitement died down as quickly as it had ignited. Except that this time, the beast reported in Lille on Tuesday was not a figment of the imagination.
It was a little before 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning that the firefighters in the North received the report of a “dangerous animal”, spotted on the side of the boulevard de la Moselle, an eccentric axis of Lille. The call was taken seriously and teams set out to find the animal whose race had not yet been specified.
Two hours to capture the feline
For an hour, the firefighters searched every corner of the area in vain. But the feline was not far away, spotted again around 7:30 a.m., a few hundred meters from the first place. This time, the beast is no longer on the public highway, but in the garden of a house. When the firefighters arrived on the scene, they found that the feline was still there and were able to identify its species: a serval.
To neutralize the threatening animal, a canine team and the Sdis veterinarian are sent to the rescue, as well as a specialized trainer and the Lille zoo veterinarian. Using a hypodermic syringe, the serval was anesthetized and then captured. He was then taken to the zoo to undergo epidemiological examinations before being placed in quarantine. To this day, no one knows yet how the serval could have arrived there or to whom it belongs.