Life with a lynx
Danielle Franklin doesn’t have pictures or knick-knacks in her house, she doesn’t get to have guests come over unannounced, or even go on vacation — because no one is going to watch her cat.
At 10 months old, her cat, Fierca, weighs almost 20 pounds and can stand on her hind legs to reach above Franklin’s waist. In another year and a half, Fierca be full-grown to nearly 30 pounds and reach her shoulders, standing almost two feet tall on all four paws.
No, Fierca is not your typical house cat — she is a Canada lynx — and on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, Polson Middle School students had the rare opportunity to meet, pet, and most importantly learn, about this unique wild animal.
Franklin bought Fierca as a 13-day-old cub from a local breeder after waiting on a five-year waiting list. She weaned her from a bottle, fed her raw meat at 12 weeks and watched her kill her first rabbit at five months old.
Fierca’s parents were captured wild and their offspring are primarily killed for their thick, silvery brown fur. But Fierca was an exception. Since she was a teenager, Franklin has wanted an exotic pet for educational purposes. After researching both the Canada and Siberian lynx, she opted for the smaller of the two — a decision she doesn’t regret one bit.
“If something happened and I had to get control of her, I could,” Franklin said. “If she was as big as a Siberian lynx, that would not be possible.”
Currently, Montana does not require a permit for owning a lynx, but Franklin is trying to change that.
“I don’t recommend that people have them for pets,” she said. “It’s not a pet, it’s a lifestyle.”
And caring for a wild animal is anything but easy.
“When she does something, I just have to watch, take a deep breath, and hope she doesn’t do too much damage,” Franklin said. “We’ve spent $8,000 on her in the last 10 months.”
A cousin to the cougar, the Canada lynx has big furry feet that act as snowshoes. In the wild, 98 percent of a lynx’s diet is the snowshoe hare. In the fall and winter, lynx can eat up to three pounds of food a day. While it hunts every day, a lynx knows how to conserve its energy if it needs to, and it can go more than a week without food.
Fierca still has her claws and fangs intact and she kills her own rabbits for food. That’s important, Franklin said, because if Fierca ever escaped, she would not be able to survive in the wild without them. However, sharp claws make for an added challenge indoors, and even playful interactions can lead to the occasional, albeit accidental, cut.
“People get them because they look cool, and they think they can feed it Friskies cat food, but they can’t — it’s so unhealthy for them,” Franklin said, adding that owners who can’t handle the big cats will sometimes release them back into the wild, even after declawing and de-fanging their pet. “Without their claws or fangs, it would be a long, horrible death for them.”
In the wild, lynx roam more than a mile a day.
“That’s a lot of energy,” Franklin said. “Just trying to keep up with that is a lot of work.”
To release some of that energy, Fierca lives in a 10-foot-high by 16-foot-wide and 32-foot-long fenced enclosure connected to the house. She can come and go as she pleases.
“We try to replicate the natural environment as much as we can,” Franklin said. “They live in dense forests with lots of snow, so her pen is as close to the forest as we can get it, with big boulders and trees, and we are planning to add climbing elements and a pond.”
In the course of a day, Fierca alternates between the rugged outdoors and the comfort of the living room couch. Franklin has six dogs, and they are by far Fierca’s best friends, but she doesn’t do well with other dogs and is not nice to her domestic cats.
“If she bit someone, even though she has her rabies vaccination, she would be killed as if she was a wild animal, so I’m very cautious with people touching her.”
Even toward the end of a long day at school, Fierca’s curiosity and playful spirit entertained Ms. Kelly’s fourth period science class, always with her handler’s experienced grip on the other end of the leash. For one brave moment, the big cat attempted to leap onto a student’s desk, only to be yanked back down to the floor, much to the surprise of the student.
“It’s OK to be scared,” Franklin said as she led Fierca calmly through the rows of desks. “It’s good to have respect for wild animals.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists the Canada lynx as a threatened species in the lower 48 states, but it is still legal to breed and kill lynx for fur. More than 15,000 are killed for fur in the United States and Canada every year. In the lower 48, population size is unknown, but it’s estimated to be under 2,000 in Montana.
“I’m hoping they will someday step up and protect them,” Franklin told the class as her PowerPoint transitioned to a slide titled “How do we protect them?”
• Don’t purchase lynx pelt — Franklin said that with modern technology, there is no longer the need there once was to kill animals for their fur.
• Don’t trap or shoot them — Lynx are solitary animals that like to kill rabbits and very rarely would they attempt to bring down anything larger unless it was sick or weak, she said.
• Don’t take kittens — While it’s legal to own a lynx as a pet, it has to come from a breeder or be obtained through a special circumstance. In other words, it’s illegal to keep kittens, even if you find them in the wild.
Finally, Franklin encouraged the students to educate others on what they learned about the lynx.
“I would love to educate the world on the lynx, but I can’t do that, so I’m hoping that the people I do educate will share the information with others,” she said.
For Franklin, caring for Fierca was a little bit like a calling from a higher power. She cites Genesis 1:28: “And let them have dominion over the fish in the sea and over the birds in the sky, the domestic animals all over the earth and all the animals that crawl on the earth.”
“I feel very blessed that God gave me Fierca, and to me, the scripture means that we are not only given dominion over animals to use and prosper from, but also to protect them,” Franklin said. “I hope by educating students on lynx, I have a hand in protecting this unprotected species.”
FACT SHEET: Canada Lynx
• The Canada lynx is a medium-sized cat with proportionately long legs and large feet.
• Lynx have long tufts of hair on their ear tips. The tail is very short with a solid black tip.
•Total length ranges from 28 to 37 inches; weight from 18 to 23 pounds. The lynx has a lighter, less spotted fur compared to a bobcat.
• Lynx are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act
• Small populations of lynx remain in only three of the 16 contiguous states originally inhabited: Montana, Washington and Maine. If lynx still exist in any of the other lower 48 states, they are very rare.
• Lynx are found above 4,000 feet in moist coniferous forests that have cold, snowy winters and support the primary prey base: snowshoe hares.