The main point of using the bobcats as an illustrative tool here is certainly not to cast bobcats as moral actors of equal moral value to that of humans. If I had continued to lay out all possible outcomes and resulting scenarios from the bobcats’ squatting, eventually I would have come to a situation in which the bobcats, having been legitimately driven off the land non-violently by the proper (human) owners, attempted to come back, and were then met legitimately with deadly force.

What if our vaunted State leaders cause our economy and our civilization to collapse entirely, as they seem so intent on doing, and new purported human homesteaders, desperate for shelter and sustenance, decide to kill the bobcats for food, and then take the property? Killing animals for food is not wrong.

I think killing the bobcats just to take property that you (the bank) claim to own based on a piece of paper that might not be entirely legitimate, written under Statist legal structures that are definitely not legitimate, is excessive and inhumane. Driving the animals off non-injuriously is absolutely right. Animals do not have property rights.

If driving animals off of their “homesteaded” land is wrong, then few other animals, humans included, would ever have been right in surviving on this planet.

I would concur on that point. However, I don’t see bobcats as rational actors in the same way as humans are either. I’ve assumed you are using them merely to illustrate a point.

And for this exact situation(ignoring the mire that government intervention has already caused in it), I believe there would be a more peaceful solution such as enclosure, ejection, and exclusion like you said. Advocates of bobcats, or nature in general, would have quite an issue with bobcats being killed. I believe a market solution to the problem would arise. At first thought, a group could offer(either charity or business) to remove them peacefully and take them to the wild, a zoo, or a nature preserve. This way the land owner retains his land and the bobcats are dealt with in a peaceful fashion.

If we assume for the sake of argument that prior claims (that of the former owner who gave the security interest to the bank, that of the developer who built the house, and probably that of the farmer who sold the land to the developer for subdivision) are legitimate, then I still see the bank as the rightful owner of the place, whether we ascribe the same moral value to bobcats as we do to humans or not. I do tend to believe that the bank — as a holder of claims rather than physical possession — has a lesser right to exercise arbitrary (and possibly lethal) control over the property than would an actual occupier. I would support the actions of a new owner with intent to occupy exercising their claim by driving the cats off the property by physically non-injurious means of enclosure, ejection and exclusion.

There are many different possible scenarios, and I don’t have entirely satisfactory answers lined up for all of them.