Bobcat attacks Mass. man in his garage

BROOKFIELD, Mass. A man in Massachusetts says all he heard was a hiss before a bobcat pounced on him in his own garage, sinking its teeth into his face and its claws in his back.

"It was on me in a split second," Roger Mundell Jr. told the Boston Globe hours after the attack. "I have bite marks in my eyelid, up my forehead. It scratched my back. I was bleeding like crazy."

Mundell went into the garage in Brookfield on Sunday morning to fetch some tie-down straps for a friend when the animal attacked.

It then ran out of the garage and bit Mundell's 15-year-old nephew on the arms and back.

Mundell and his wife pinned the cat to the ground and shot it dead.

Mundell, his nephew and his wife, are being treated for rabies. His wife wasn't bitten, but got the animal's blood on her.

State Environmental Police took the bobcat to have it tested for rabies, which they think is likely given its unusual behavior.

"This is completely out of character for a bobcat, even to be in the garage in the first place," Tom French, assistant director for the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, told the Boston Globe. "It is completely consistent with an animal that may have rabies."

Mundell added to the Boston Globe that while bobcats are common around his home, he has never had a problem with them. French added that there might have been only one other bobcat attack in the state.