From the Associated Press, December 10, 2008:

Santa Claus posed with a very large kitty on his lap — and now, unfortunately, he might need rabies shots. Jonathan Bebbington was playing the jolly old elf during a Santa Paws photo event at a PetsMart store when he was bitten Sunday on the wrist and hand. The event was to raise money for Penny Angel’s Beagle Rescue group.

The cat and owner disappeared after the incident. At least one person thought it was a bobcat, said Joan Kerr, president of Penny Angel’s.

“It had absolutely huge paws, like 3 inches around,” Kerr said.

One person reported that the cat’s name was Benny.

Of course, anyone with even a nodding familiarity with common urban slang knows that benny is a nickname for the drug benzedrine. According to one description of their effects, bennies “hit users with a fast high, making them feel powerful, alert, and energized… pump up heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, and they can also cause sweating, shaking, headaches, sleeplessness, and blurred vision… Prolonged use may cause hallucinations and intense paranoia.”

The AP story notes, drily:

The woman who brought it to the store told people there she bought the cat from a breeder in Wyoming for $1,500.

“Her last words were, ‘I have a permit and the cat has all his vaccines,'” Bebbington said.

Her last words. Right. Wanna bet that “have” wasn’t her only four-letter last word?

Some posts just write themselves…

Update, 2008-12-12: There’s been a flurry of conflicting later reports about this. One AP followup story, posted at the MSNBC site — including a video of Jonathan Bebbington, his (rather minor) wounds, and the cat itself — claimed that the cat, hallelujah, was not a bobcat after all.

Reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer determined, specifically, that it was a special breed called a “pixie-bob” — domesticated, merely resembling a real bobcat.

Not so fast, says the Big Cat News blog:

…that is a bobcat. I have worked with bobcats for more than 20 years and have 47 of them at Big Cat Rescue. The cat is not a hybrid, not a Pixie Bob. The owner is lying. See dozens of bobcat photos for yourself at BigCatRescue.org Carole Baskin CEO of Big Cat Rescue

Pixie Bob breeders also commented at the site [where the blogger read the Inquirer story] that the cat in Santa’s lap is not a Pixie Bob.

We on the outside are left to wonder. We wonder about the cat, of course. We wonder about the cat’s owner. And we wonder what must have been running through Jonathan Bebbington’s mind when someone handed him 30 pounds of muscle, fur, fangs, and claws, and the first dog barked.