(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — The Cosley Zoo in Wheaton has announced that its 19-year-old bobcat, Val, has died.
Val the bobcat came to the zoo in Wheaton in 2012.
“I was actually part of the team that brought him in. I picked him up at the airport when he came, and I was there at the end,” the zoo’s animal curator, Angie Musselman, said Tuesday.
Val had kidney disease and had to be euthanized on Christmas Day.
“It is hard. It’s really hard for the animal care staff who really get to know these animals and have a relationship with them — just as if it were our own animals at home,” she said.
Val — short for Valentino — lived at the zoo with his brother Sal. Sal died a couple of years ago.
Musselman said Val and Sal were rescues from an attic in a California home.
The Cosley Zoo’s Facebook page has expressions of sympathy from several hundred people.
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