A woman in the Georgetown neighborhood of the nation’s capital caught an enormous cat on camera scaling her fence in the early hours of the morning.
Giulia di Marzo said she checked the footage from her Ring security camera Sunday morning to find the wild video of the huge feline prowling around her property around 4 a.m., according to NBC Washington.
The video shows the animal crawl its way up a wooden fence and walk along the top of it before leaping down into di Marzo’s yard. The wood fence also has claw marks on it.
“This thing is huge and it has short hair. It is not any kind of domestic cat that I’ve ever seen before,” di Marzo said, noting that she and her boyfriend are not planning on letting their own cat outside in the near future.
Animal control officials in Washington said they received calls about the spotting. The officials said they contacted the Smithsonian National Zoo to see if there were any missing animals, but the zoo said that no animals have gotten loose.
Mountain lions are not indigenous to the area. The cats are found in 14 states on the West Coast, with a small endangered population in southern Florida.
UPDATE: Biologists who watched the footage determined that the animal depicted in the video was not a mountain lion, but just a domestic cat. “We’re confident it’s a common domestic cat,” said Tommy Wells, director of the District’s Department of Energy and Environment. “The camera appears to have distorted the size of a domestic cat.”
