A wild African serval has been spotted multiple times in rural Gardner, and Grundy County Animal Control is racing to trap the exotic cat before it wanders further across the county's farmland. The animal got away from its owner a few weeks ago in Reddick, and officials say it has been on the move ever since.
Grundy County Animal Control has already made contact with the serval's owner and confirmed the cat is loose in the area, according to WSPY News. The agency, headquartered at 310 East Dupont Road in Morris under Director Angela Olson, is asking anyone who spots the cat to text the location to 815-351-8495 so crews can respond in real time, per Grundy County. Officials have also asked the public not to approach the serval under any circumstances.
The station's report notes that Reddick, where the cat first slipped away from its owner, sits roughly 10 to 15 miles south of Gardner near the borders of Kankakee, Livingston, and Grundy counties, according to Travelmath. That stretch of open, rural farmland gives the animal plenty of room to roam undetected between sightings.
Why This Cat Is So Hard To Catch
Servals are medium-sized wild cats native to sub-Saharan Africa, typically weighing 20 to 40 pounds and standing up to 24 inches at the shoulder, with legs longer relative to body size than any other feline, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Those long legs give servals extraordinary jumping power, letting them leap 9 to 10 feet straight up to snatch birds out of the air and bound as far as 13 feet horizontally, with a hunting success rate near 50 percent in the wild.
The animal can also run up to 50 mph and cover more than 1.5 miles a day while hunting, per Africa Freak, which helps explain why a single loose serval can turn up in scattered locations across rural Gardner over the course of weeks. Animal control officials said they will keep the public updated as the weekend progresses, per the same account from WSPY News.
Not the First Serval To Slip Its Enclosure in Illinois
Illinois has seen this play out before. In November 2023, an escaped serval in Vernon Hills chased and cornered a resident who was walking her dog before its owners, with police help, managed to capture it; the cat later died from injuries sustained during the trip back to its enclosure, according to FOX 32 Chicago. A month earlier, an African serval named Reese escaped a Decatur apartment after a guest left a door open and evaded Macon County Animal Control and exotic animal specialists for weeks on the city's northeast side, as reported by WAND TV.
A Legal Gray Area Fuels Repeat Escapes
Part of the reason servals keep turning up loose across Illinois traces back to a gap in state law. Under the Illinois Dangerous Animals Act, private possession of servals is not banned statewide because the statute's definition of dangerous animal covers lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cougars, bears, and wolves, but not servals, according to Justia Law. Separate state administrative rules do bar pet shops from selling servals, civets, and other wild feline species in Illinois, but that restriction does not touch private ownership.
That loophole has drawn attention from state lawmakers. Following a string of exotic cat escapes, legislators introduced House Bill 4446 and Senate Bill 1192 to expand the Dangerous Animals Act and explicitly ban private possession of servals, caracals, kangaroos, wallabies, and their hybrids, according to the Student Newsroom. For now, though, the Gardner cat remains at large while Grundy County Animal Control works to bring it in safely.
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