Ring-Tailed Cat Texas: Couple Spots Rare Lemur-Like Animal In San Antonio, Thought It Was A Monkey Watching Them Play Basketball

A ring-tailed cat was spotted in San Antonio, Texas. The ring-tailed cat is a rare animal native to Texas, and looks similar to a lemur.

Eric Garcia was outside playing basketball when his girlfriend noticed a strange-looking animal watching them from his perch on the power lines, according to KVUE news.

"I was afraid of it," Jackie Zamora, Garcia's girlfriend, said. "I just saw its tail, just wagging."

Neither Garcia nor Zamora had seen an animal like this one before. It had zebra-like stripes on its tail, and looked a little like a possum or raccoon.

 "A possum has a rat tail, so it wasn't that," Garcia said. "Raccoon, they're too fluffy. So I started thinking, 'What could it be; what could it be?' Then it came to my head, 'Has to be a monkey.'

"The tail. That's what got me thinking, 'zebra tail, where'd that come from?'" Garcia said.

Garcia tried to coax the animal down from the power lines while Zamora called animal control to report the creature on the loose.

The San Antonio Zoo got word of the animal spotted, and believed it to be a lemur, as they have very similar tails.

However, the zoo reported no missing lemurs from the exhibit. This meant it could only be one thing, an animal often mistaken for the ring-tailed lemur: the ring-tailed cat.

"They have very similar tails. Ring-tailed cats are actually not cats, they're related to raccoons. And they are much smaller and native to Texas. So that would be a much more likely suspect to what was spotted," zookeeper Lyssa MacMillan said.

Zoo officials said the ring-tailed cat is nocturnal and so reclusive that most Texans won't ever see the animal outside of a zoo, especially not during the daytime. However, KVUE reports that ring-tailed cats enjoy hanging around a particular parking lot on the city's southeast side.