Atlanta Woman Wakes Up to Find a Wild African Serval Cat on Her Bed: 'I'm in Bed Freaking Out'

An Atlanta woman recently woke up to a shocking find: a wild African cat beside her in bed.

Kristine Frank, a resident of Atlanta's Brookhaven neighborhood, shared the details of the surprising encounter with WXIA. According to the outlet, Frank found a serval — a wild cat native to Africa sometimes kept as an exotic pet — in her bed. She explained that the animal, which likely got into Frank's home when she let her dog outside in the middle of the night, was over two feet tall with pointy ears and spots.

"I yell for my husband and yell. 'Dave, that is not a cat!' So, he comes in the room, and I'm just in bed freaking out. He locked eyes with the cat, and the cat was kind of cornered. So, I slowly got out of the bed and tippy-toed out, and my husband was able to get the cat out of the house," Frank told WXIA.

After the serval was out of the house, Frank called animal control. They told her to contact the Department of Natural Resources to begin an investigation. The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) told WXIA that the wild cat is likely in the Atlanta area because someone is keeping the feline as a pet, which is illegal in the state of Georgia, despite no federal laws against it.

"I just think if my dog would have been in the house, what would have happened to my dog? If I had small children, what would have happened to them?" Frank said of the incident.

Residents of the neighborhood were notified about the feline intruder. The serval cat was eventually humanely trapped in a neighbor's backyard.

"We've offered to place the serval in a sanctuary where she will get adequate care, proper nutrition, and the space she needs to thrive and exhibit a lot of those natural behaviors that are impossible in private homes," ALDF senior legislative affairs manager Alicia Prygoski said in a statement about the wild cat's future on Twitter.

The organization followed up by saying, "Wild cats are not meant for private possession. We need federal laws — like the #BigCatPublicSafetyAct —to keep wild cats out of homes and beds!"

"The message here is just that wild cats are not supposed to be pets, and they can be a danger to a community and surrounding neighborhoods," an ALDF representative told WXIA.