Purr-sonality

Female Serval

1/1/95 – 8/29/16 (usually a DOB of 1/1 means we don’t know exactly, but it truly was her birthdate)

As with many of the servals we have at Big Cat Rescue, PURRsonality seems to enjoy the daily attention she gets from her volunteer keepers. She eagerly plays with any enrichment items that are given to her to break up the monotony of life in captivity. She can be seen batting spice bags around and rubbing and rubbing them until the scent has completely disappeared.

As with most of our servals, this is the type of playful, non-threatening behavior you’ll see from them during the daytime. But, feeding time is a whole different story. The minute food is involved; these diminutive little cats become dangerous carnivores. PURRsonality is no exception.

Though servals are often touted as great exotic pets, nothing could be farther from the truth. Ask many of our keepers and they will all say the same thing: they’d much prefer feeding the larger tigers than these little wildcats like PURRsonality. Looks can be very deceiving!

A month after the dental work and she never did go back to eating enough.  As her appetite continued to wain we decided to sedate her again, run blood work again and do an exploratory surgery.  We had seen something suspicious looking in her ultrasound a month ago, but weren’t sure, so we figured at the age of 21 there wasn’t much hope, but maybe we’d find something that could be fixed.

We didn’t.  Her blood work showed that her kidneys were done, as did the exploratory, and so we made the sad decision to euthanize her.

See More About PurrSonality:

See a video of PurrSonality shredding toilet paper – https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=agVnhrFD3ww

Most of our servals were rescued from people who got them as pets and were not prepared for the fact that male or female, altered or not, they all spray buckets of urine when they become adults. Some were being sold at auction where taxidermists would buy them and club them to death in the parking lot, but a few were born here in the early days when we were ignorant of the truth and were being told by the breeders and dealers that these cats should be bred for “conservation.” Once we learned that there are NO captive breeding programs that actually contribute to conservation in the wild we began neutering and spaying our cats in the mid 1990’s.  Knowing what we do about the intelligence and magnificence of these creatures we do not believe that exotic cats should be bred for lives in cages. Read more about our Evolution of Thought HERE

Tributes to Purr-Sonality Serval