This is the moment a leopard cat trapped in a disused well is saved by cops who found it thanks to their keen-eyed police dog.
K-9 Unit policeman Liu Daisen and his partner heard the pooch barking while returning home from a mission in the town of Hujiaba in Ningqian County in north-western China’s Shaanxi Province.
Liu said: “I heard the police dog barking and thought there was a suspect hiding somewhere.”
Video Credit: AsiaWire
He added: “I walked over and saw a wild cat.”
The Malinois dog had spotted a leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) trapped at the bottom of the disused well, and Liu spent 30 minutes trying to rescue it.
“It looked ferocious, but it had an injured paw. It was bleeding,” Liu said.
He added: “I used the police dog’s lead and made a loop at the end. I lassoed it out of the well.”
The footage shows Liu’s colleague filming the cat dangling from the dog lead.
He says: “We’ve caught a little tiger!”
Liu took the cat back to the police station and handed it over to forestry authorities, who identified it as the Class II state-protected species.
They have taken it in and will release it back to the wild once it has recovered from its injury.
Archaeologists believe the leopard cat was the first cat species domesticated by residents of neolithic China.
This man-cat relationship is believed to have happened 5,000 years ago in today’s Shaanxi and Henan provinces.
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Story By: Scott Feng, Sub-Editor: Michael Leidig, Agency: AsiaWire
