View from the North 40: Here kitty, kitty. Nice kitty. What th-

Do you ever read or hear some news on an obscure topic about which you know a thing or two because, hey, life can take you in strange directions, but you hear the thing and you know some stuff and you wonder how did those people come out of that intact?

Three well-meaning people from San Antonio, Texas, sustained bite injuries from kittens they rescued from an alley, an Associated Press article from Wednesday says, and the kittens turned out to be bobcat cubs.

The trio, who heard what they thought were domestic kittens mewling, found what they thought were Bengal kittens.

Bengal cats are a domestic hybrid developed in the 1950s and ’60s by crossing wild Asian leopard cats with everyday cat cats to get a domestic feline that looks like a kind of miniature leopard.

Bengals are worth a lot of money, like thousands of dollars, so the three rescuers either thought they had just done some bengal owner a real favor or that they had come into an awesome little money-maker for themselves. Either way, the next part of the article is funny enough I have to quote it.

“They fed the bobcats milk from pet-feeding bottles, but realized something was amiss when the aggressive animals tore the bottles apart and bit them.”

Bobcat kittens, you see, are by temperament the equivalent of a feral cat — one of those crazy, tough as nails, part psycho ones that are all scarred up and will cross the road just to knock the stuffing out of a Rottweiler because it’s breathing too loudly in its sleep — crossed with the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil.

You remember the Tasmanian Devil, right? The fan website wikia.com describes him as “capable of becoming an unstoppable, whirling tornado of destruction.” That’s about right.

Bobcat cubs will sit there looking somehow cute and stunningly gorgeous at the same time with their slightly exotic looks, kitten-blue eyes, and over-sized feet and ears, and they purr like a fined-tuned American-made muscle car. But when you get a hold of one, a switch flips and what you have is a whirling mass of fur and needles and razor blades that you are trying to let go of but you can’t shake off the needles and blades that keep coming at you.

Like a tornado hellbent on razing an entire neighborhood, once the bobcat cub decides it is going to tear you a new something for personal violations, real or imagined, it’s going to stay attached to get the job done.

My dad, in his day, was a large, formidably athletic man trained by various law enforcement entities and irreplaceable on-the-job experience to subdue people and animals with efficiency.

He once, for reasons that require a too-long explanation to drag out here, grabbed in a leaping catch — like he was hauling in the game-winning Hail Mary pass — a roughly 60-pound mountain lion cub as it bounded out of a tree. The only way he could safely keep the feline contained until his backup could stop laughing and come to his rescue was by bear-hugging the lion cub and using his entire 250-pound self to press the animal into the deep snow.

He came away looking like he had just run his uniform, chest, hands and wrists through a blender.

When asked if he would do that again, he would say something like, I would hate to, but given the circumstances I would.

When asked by their caregiver, who was offering welding gloves for protection, if Dad wanted to examine a pair of abandoned bobcat cubs, Dad didn’t even wait until he stopped laughing and cleared the tears from his eyes before saying, No.

Given what I know about bobcat cubs, the only way I can think of that those three “rescuers” actually got home with the bobcats and didn’t require an ER visit afterward is that the cute little whirling dervishes were either weak from long-term neglect or abandonment — or the three people are actually meta-humans with superpowers that make them impervious to any weapons up to and including a small nuclear blast.

——

Either way, they should feel lucky at [email protected].