Louisiana firefighters investigating a minor fire at a home in Marrero, a suburban New Orleans community, on Tuesday found an African serval, a wildcat native to sub-Saharan Africa, in a chain-linked enclosure in the backyard, a spokesperson for the local animal protection services said.

Illegal Enclosure and Exotic Animal Permit

The director of Jefferson Protection and Animal Welfare Services (JPaws), Michelle Brignac, and humane department supervisor Victoria Clark joined firefighters at the scene after being summoned. Local laws require an exotic animal permit to legally keep a serval as a pet, and the owner of the home at the center of the case did not have such a document, JPaws spokesperson John McCusker told the Guardian on Thursday.

Brignac and Clark “subdued the hissing serval and wrangled it” into a transport carrier from its 9ft-by-9ft (7.53-sq-meter) cage, which McCusker described as “a dog kennel.” They then transported the serval to the JPaws facility in Harvey, where the agency shared vivid photographs of the wildcat.

Challenges of Keeping Servals as Pets

Servals are known for their ability to leap as high as 7ft (2 meters) in the air and share some similarities with domesticated cats, including their affinities for grooming themselves, purring, yowling, and stalking potential prey. However, they are not easily sustained as pets, according to JPaws’ statement.

Servals in captivity do not have the physical space and stimulation needed to engage in normal, healthy behaviors and endure chronic stress as a result, though they mark their territory, become aggressive as they mature, cannot be fully house-trained, and destroy furniture. Experts also say servals require a diet and specialized care beyond what house cats need, making them a major responsibility.

Search for a Permanent Home

JPaws said the agency would explore having the serval held temporarily at New Orleans’ Audubon zoo. However, a zoo spokesperson said the institution did not plan to take the serval in and understood JPaws was looking into another arrangement, the details of which were not immediately available on Thursday.

The Marrero serval was the latest of several indicators of the wildcats’ growing popularity, a boom driven in part by social media content creators showing them in videos online. Cases involving servals have also tended to generate widely read news headlines in North America.

That happened in Ohio in 2023, when officials in the Cincinnati area captured an African serval named Amiry that was spotted in a Cincinnati neighborhood tree and later tested positive for cocaine. In late 2025, a search for an African serval that escaped a Pennsylvania wildlife center culminated in heartbreak after a motorist fatally struck the wildcat, as Philadelphia’s NBC News affiliated reported.

Authorities in the Canadian city of Vancouver returned an African serval to its owners after it escaped and nestled under a neighbor’s porch in June; the British Columbia province to which Vancouver belongs had just banned keeping exotic cats such as African servals as pets. However, the owners of such cats were given until the beginning of May 2027 to apply for permits to legally possess them.