No, this isn’t the sequel to the movie Cocaine Bear…
Rather, it is a wild story about a wild African big cat that was found with traces of cocaine in its system in Ohio.
This story is going viral now, but according to NPR.org, the events that unfolded with this serval wild cat happened back in January.
According to reports, officials were called to the scene with reports that a “leopard” was stuck up in a tree. Those that arrived to the scene couldn’t identify the cat on the spot, but they knew that it is illegal to own many types of big cats in the state of Ohio.
The “cocaine cat” was being kept as a pet, and it allegedly escaped from the owner’s car during a police stop in January. Seems like a scene right out of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006).
The animal was eventually captured by a division of the Cincinnati Animal Control, and in order to identify it, they took it back to the shelter and called in an expert in big cats. The expert suspected it was a serval, which was a far ways away from its native habitat in sub-Saharan Africa. To confirm the experts inclinations, the medical team took a DNA sample along with testing the big cat for narcotics.
Sure enough, the wild cat was in fact a serval and tested positive for cocaine exposure.
So why was the big cat tested for narcotics? Apparently that has become common practice for the Cincinnati Animal Control when discovering exotic animals as pets.
A monkey that was seized last year from a home in Cincinnati after videos surfaced online of the capuchin monkey ingesting “powder-like substances” tested positive for narcotics. Since then, any exotic animal that comes through the Cincinnati Animal Control building has been tested for drugs so that they can be given proper care if needed.
The shelter did not have the capabilities to house the serval big cat, now coined “Cocaine Cat” by the internet, so it now is being housed at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. The big cat is reported to be doing very well there, and the zoo hopes to one day add it into its Big Cat Ambassador program.
So no, this story might not be as exciting as the true story that led to the comedy-thriller Cocaine Bear (2023), but that didn’t stop the internet from sending out a frenzy of memes about the viral “Cocaine Cat”:
