08/15/2026
A bobcat was directly observed killing an adult female pronghorn in South Dakota. On October 22, 2002, at 2:44 in the afternoon, researchers tracking a radiocollared pronghorn in northwestern South Dakota watched a bobcat begin stalking her through dense sagebrush at the base of a hill. By 2:49, the bobcat had closed to within 30 feet. At 2:50, it attacked. It landed on the pronghorn's back, bit into the back of the neck while gripping the front shoulders with its claws, repositioned, and locked onto the throat. At 2:53, the pronghorn was dead. Three minutes from contact to suffocation. An 88-pound adult female pronghorn killed by a cat that weighed a fraction of what she did, timed to the minute by the researchers who were there to check her radio signal and instead watched her die.
Christopher Jacques and Jonathan Jenks at South Dakota State University had collared the pronghorn, designated P1704, in Harding County six months earlier as part of a long-term survival study. They located her by ground telemetry at 2:43 that afternoon, bedded alone at the base of a southeast-facing slope in a stand of sagebrush within 115 feet of a shallow creek. One minute later they saw the bobcat. It was already stalking. They watched for five minutes as the cat used the rolling terrain and the dense sagebrush to close the distance without being detected. Snow on the ground allowed them to reconstruct the approach afterward. Tracks showed the bobcat had stalked to within 23 feet before launching.
The attack sequence was clinical. The bobcat hit P1704 while she was still on the ground. It bit into the back of the neck first, driving its claws into her shoulders to hold position on an animal three to four times its weight that was now trying to stand and run. Then it shifted. It released the back of the neck, moved its jaws forward, and clamped onto the throat. The necropsy confirmed what the researchers saw happen in real time: significant trauma to the hyoid bones, tooth puncture wounds through the neck, and a completely severed trachea. P1704 died of suffocation. The bobcat had crushed her airway in three minutes.
By 2:58, five minutes after the kill, the bobcat was eating muscle tissue from the right hindquarter. The researchers interrupted it to investigate the kill site and examine the carcass.
P1704 was 5.5 years old. She weighed 88 pounds. A healthy adult female pronghorn of her age should have weighed roughly 105. The researchers described her as moderately emaciated, with protruding ribs, backbone, and pelvis visible through the hide. She was underweight, alone, and bedded in terrain that favored the ambush predator instead of the prey. Pronghorn survive by seeing danger from a distance and outrunning it across open ground. P1704 was lying in dense sagebrush at the base of a hill next to a creek, surrounded by the kind of cover that a bobcat is built to hunt in and a pronghorn is built to avoid.
She had been a loner. Jacques and Jenks noted that P1704 was often observed traveling alone and rarely traveled with more than five other pronghorn. She was last seen with a group of four animals on October 19, three days before the kill. At the time of the attack, no other pronghorn tracks were found within 330 feet of the kill site. She had separated from the herd that existed to protect her from exactly this, and she had bedded down in habitat that gave every advantage to the predator and none to her.
The paper was the first direct visual observation of bobcat predation on an adult pronghorn ever recorded in the scientific literature. Bobcats had been found on pronghorn carcasses before. Kill sites had been examined and attributed to bobcats based on claw marks and bite patterns. Nobody had watched it happen until Jacques and Jenks sat in Harding County with a telemetry antenna, found their collared pronghorn lying in the sagebrush, and one minute later saw a bobcat walking toward her through the same brush with a plan that took three minutes to finish.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Jacques and Jenks (2008), American Midland Naturalist / South Dakota State University.
