Sunapee
Then, sickle in hand, she got to weeding a nearby rosebush. That’s when a bobcat, later determined to be rabid, lunged from the thicket.
The attacking animal bit her left cheek and caused lacerations on her arms and back.
Her son, Gene Dabrowski, who lives in a house on the same property about a hundred yards away, ran over with a shotgun when he heard the noise the farm’s five dogs were making.
“It wasn’t like normal dog play,” he said. “So I knew something was wrong.”
He found his mother climbing back onto her porch, her face bloodied. She’d fought the bobcat off with the sickle, and the dogs had leapt into the fray, chasing the cat under the chicken coop.
Gene Dabrowski killed the cat with his shotgun, and then drove his mother to New London hospital, where she received “50 to 60” stitches, he said.
“We got home from the hospital at 4 a.m. At 7:15 this morning she went back outside to feed her animals,” he said.
State wildlife officials picked up the animal carcass on Monday morning to have it tested. By that afternoon, health officials had already called to confirm it was rabid, Gene Dabrowski said in an email.
Dabrowski, an experienced trapper, had suspected as much — the bobcat had porcupine quills in its mouth, and healthy cats know to keep away from the prickly rodent.
His mother was at the Manchester VA Medical Center awaiting a rabies shot, he said, and the dogs had already gone in for boosters.
New Hampshire Fish and Game wildlife biologist Patrick Tate said that there are anywhere between 2,500 and 3,000 bobcats in the summertime in New Hampshire.
The population is growing at a rate of about 10 percent each year, he said, and the department gets several calls each week about bobcats wandering into residential areas.
“Close contact to humans has become very common,” Tate said – although aggression is still extremely rare.
The last time a bobcat tested positive for rabies in New Hampshire was 2013, Tate said. That year, two did — one who tried to pounce on a pair of turkey hunters, and another who attacked a pet dog.
Tate said there had been a few reports of rabid bobcats in Connecticut and Massachusetts in recent years. That, together with increased sightings of the animal, suggests that the bobcat population is reaching “biological carrying capacity” in the region, he said.
As an area becomes overpopulated, predator populations will self-regulate, mostly through disease and starvation, Tate said.
Once in decline, the bobcat population has been steadily rising since 1989, when hunting and trapping the animal was banned.