Panther on the Prowl

[Nick]

There are a never-ending role call of Big Cat sightings in the UK (or ABCs - Alien Big Cats). I swear that once I saw one on the rim of a roadside in Kent! It was a cat, it was big it was black, it wasn't a moggy. Only caveat, I was in a car at the time. I saw a programme once in which an expert tracker came over from the US and dismissed every sighting or photograph as either a dog's mark or, depending on the location, up Scotland way, that of an indiginous wild cat.

The two sources usually cited are trendy types in the late 60s and 70s keeping big cats then when they were outlawed freeing them out the back garden of their hippy mansions into their shiny happy spiritual homeland of the wild. And cats that have escaped from wildlife park enclosures. That they keep persisting would suggest that they would need to mate (the chances of a couple of balck panthers hitching up in the English countryside... Hmm).

And another HERE, in Buckinghamshire. What I focus on in that picture is the white streak down the front of the cat. To my knowledge black panthers have no such feature. Funny thing is that none of these photos or peices of video footage are ever crystal clear, are they?! By the law of averages you would think that at least one of them would be.

And just so the good folks across the pond might not feel left out with the Big Black Cat phenomenon!

[Richard H. Fay]

There are out-of-place big cats here in New York as well. Several years ago, my wife and I saw a dead puma on the side of the road as we were going along the New York side of the Massachusetts turnpike on a trip to the Higgins Armoury in Worcester, MA. And another driver obviously saw it as well, because he had pulled his car over near the poor deceased cat.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was a puma. It was a large tawny cat with long tail and rounded ears. Having a B.S. in Biology does help in animal identification - I used to work in biology labs, and I know a thing or two about observing key identification features, from fungal spores to amphipods.

Of course, pumas are officially extinct in New York State, and have been for close to one hundred years. And maybe, if this was indeed a puma (which I'm sure it was), it was just an escaped exotic pet. However, this doesn't necessarily explain the occasional sightings of pumas in the wilds of Upstate New York. Perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn't a tragic end for someone's overgrown kitty. Perhaps it was an unlucky encounter between a truly wild puma and a speeding vehicle, the death of a member of a relic population of New York state resident pumas still lurking in the forest shadows.

To muddy matters even further, I recently saw an episode of the show Monster Quest that presented some compelling evidence that big black cats, probably melanistic leopards, roam downstate from our location. So New York seems to have a population of big black cats, too.

[Richard H. Fay]

Of course, most if not all the photos I've seen claiming to be ABCs have been domestic cats (more pointed ears than most big cats, domestic cat proportions, etc.). However, I always recall a nature show I saw about a biologist travelling to India to get a photograph of a tiger. After a month or two with no tigers in sight, she left the sub-continent with nothing to show for her efforts. A short while after her departure, other researchers caught a tiger on a trail camera.

Cats can be elusive creatures, especially when they have learned to avoid man, or suffer the consequences. If anything can avoid the hunters, trackers, and cryptozoologists, it would be a cat. Sometimes it's hard enough to find our pet cats in the restricted confines of our own home!

[RobertB]

I've seen some poor but convincing film. Whatever it was, it moved like a smallish big cat (ie puma not lion), and it wasn't any of our normal fauna. There's a lot of country in the UK which would be good for them, and they're shy and hard to see. They cover a big range, so if cats were released (which is perfectly plausible) then there's no problem with the idea of a few of them meeting up and mating.