Carson Bender was hunting near Wisconsin Rapids and now his video has millions of views.<\/p>\n
A Wisconsin turkey hunter is going viral after being stalked and then attacked by a bobcat – and he caught it all on camera!<\/p>\n
Carson Bender is an avid hunter. On Friday, he was in the woods near his hometown of Wisconsin Rapids when he said he heard something behind him.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Sounded like it was patting a leaf behind me, so I turned my phone on down by my side to see what was behind me and lucky enough, I hit record and saw a bobcat sitting there looking at me,” said Bender.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old already had his eyes on a turkey and periodically kept looking at his phone to also watch the bobcat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I guess I didn’t realize how laser focused it was just on me and it just so happened before I got to shoot the turkey, the bobcat decided to grab onto my arm,” said Bender.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The more than minute-long video is now going viral online. It has nearly three million views and even shocked University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor and Extension Wildlife Specialist David Drake.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s not a normal, common encounter and then to catch it on camera on top of it,” said Drake, who says people shouldn’t be overly concerned about encounters like this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He says the bobcat population is growing all across the state. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources last counted about 3,500 bobcats in 2019. In a statement to KARE 11, it wrote, “The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources stopped producing abundance estimates for bobcats in 2019. We have since transitioned to using trend indices for population monitoring (e.g. age and sex structure, catch-per-unit effort for hunters and trappers, Snapshot Wisconsin) to inform decision-making for both the northern and southern management units. Current population indices indicate a stable to increasing bobcat population statewide.”<\/p>\n
KARE 11 Reporter Jennifer Hoff asked Drake if bobcats are a dangerous animal and he said, “They’re not like a mountain lion; they probably wouldn’t kill you, but they could tear you up.”<\/p>\n
Drake calls them curious, but shy and easy to scare off. It may have rattled Bender, but didn’t stop him from hunting.<\/p>\n
“Shook it off and was right back to hunting turkeys,” said Bender, who ended up bagging a turkey a couple days later. “It was cool, a little freaky, but it was cool.”<\/p>\n
Bender said he had a few scratches on his shoulder. His girlfriend convinced him to go to the doctor and he was treated with antibiotics.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carson Bender was hunting near Wisconsin Rapids and now his video has millions of views. A Wisconsin turkey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-601772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}