Scientists Tested 1,700 American Bobcats — And Their DNA Told a Completely Different Story

Scientists Tested 1,700 American Bobcats — And Their DNA Told a Completely Different Story Pennsylvania used to have two wild cats, and only one of them made it back. In 1916 the state put a fifteen dollar bounty on the bobcat, which was serious money then, and over the next twenty two years more than seven thousand were carried out of the woods. Then the bounty ended and the cats got something worse, no protection at all, which meant you could shoot them any day of the year for the next thirty two years. The lynx slipped away so quietly during all this that nobody can say when the last one walked those ridges. What turned it around was one law change in 1970 and then three decades with the season closed. Nothing else. No stocking, no releases, whatever people want to believe. By 2000 there were over three thousand adults and today they take more than a thousand a year. The part I find genuinely brilliant is that Pennsylvania's cats did not just refill their own forests. DNA from Ohio's bobcats, which had been completely wiped out by the mid 1800s, shows the eastern group there was seeded by cats walking in from West Virginia and Pennsylvania. An animal the state once paid to exterminate became the breeding stock for somebody else's comeback. And here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Coyotes picked up wolf DNA on their way east, which is partly why eastern coyotes are bigger. The bobcat got no such help, because there was no lynx left here to pair with. It rebuilt itself out of nothing but time and stubbornness, and I think that makes it the better story.