brian dunigan
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Monopolies, anticompetitive behavior, and inflated pricing notwithstanding, I thought I got my money’s worth out of their program.
This is due to public policy of not either stirring up local hunters to kill as many cats as they can or scaring residents of the expanding suburbs of Northwest Arkansas, where the cats are most likely to be.
That’s one certainty in this whole thing – if the cats do turn up, there will be a lot of people trying to wipe them right back out.
On the other hand, the guy is a biologist. To give an example, that’s like flashing a card with a picture of a car on it and then asking a professional car designer at Ford and me to identify the make and model. Chances are, the Ford employee is going to be accurate, or more accurate, and I am not.
The Ford employee would be more likely to get the color right, too. 😉
Okay, I’m done.
bd
It’s a BIG long shot to say there are wild mountain lions at all in South Carolina, where that incident happened. But on top of that, we’re supposed to believe a population of these extremely rare animals has survived AND it also has an extremely rare melanistic mutation that has never been scientifically documented?
Let me give an example. Suppose I claim that I saw an Ivory Billed Woodpecker in the woods of Tennessee. Now Ivory Bills have been officially extinct in Tennessee since 1920, but people claim they’re still out there. But on top of that, I claim the one I saw was also an albino! The odds would be so far against that being true that it would be impossible.
Besides, there has never, ever been a scientifically documented case of melanism in cougars. There are no photos of a black cougar, even in captivity. People who claim to have seen one have never been able to produce any physical evidence. You might as well be looking for a Yeti.
Jaguars exhibit melanism (rarely), but they wouldn’t be found in the wild anywhere within a thousand miles of the Chatooga. If the ranger is claiming he was attacked by a black jaguar, well, that’s pretty hard to believe.
I’m sorry to have to be the skeptic in this thread.
Yeah, I’ve heard (and seen) bobcats too but what I heard was no bobcat. Most bobcats aren’t that much bigger than a large barn cat but, yes, they could be responsible for some reports I’d imagine.
Bobcats can get up to 30 lbs. and have been known to take down deer on rare occasions. So they can get substantially bigger (and louder, and tougher) than a barn cat.
I remember back when I was in high school, someone released an alligator in the lake I live on. There were scores of sightings, with people putting the gator’s length anywhere from 8 to 12 feet. When it was finally trapped by game wardens, it was a baby, not even 3 feet long. The local news ran a hilarious bit where they played video of witness after witness talking about how huge the gator was, superimposed over a picture of the game warden holding the baby gator toward the camera.
My point is that when people get excited and see something they’re not used to seeing, their accounts of what they see, and how big it is, aren’t very reliable. A big bobcat sighted by someone who’s never seen one, and who’s just heard a terrifyingly loud scream like they’ve never heard before, could easily become a sighting of a much larger “panther.”
Of course, that still doesn’t explain all the people swearing they’ve seen big black panthers, since neither the bobcats nor the panthers (cougars) are black. They’re seeing an animal that does not exist.
bd
If you ask around, you will literally hear about hundreds of sightings in Florida, as far north as the panhandle. I have family down there, and every one of them will tell you a panther story.
My prior comment about Arkansas applies equally to Missouri. It’s possible there are a few wild mountain lions in Missouri. It’s also most likely that these are a few wide-ranging individuals that have wandered in from contiguous states (Oklahoma, most likely). It doesn’t mean there is an established population of sufficient size to breed and sustain itself.
It doesn’t even mean that these cats have established a constant presence in the state. We’re talking about cats that will wander over hundreds of miles.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that there are enough to lend credence to even a fraction of the sightings that are reported each year, unless these are the least secretive and most active mountain lions in history.
bd
Unlike big foot or the white river monster wild black panthers were being shot and killed in Arkansas up until the 70’s, I think there’s a big difference.
I don’t think a wild “black” panther has ever been killed in Arkansas. Ever. There is no separate species of big cat called a “black panther” – it is an extremely rare mutation usually found in jungle cats such as jaguars and leopards. Most of the black panthers in existence today are leopards that have been selectively bred in captivity for the melanistic gene.
The big cats that may (or may not) still survive in Arkansas are mountain lions. “Panther” is just an alternative name, like cougar, puma, or catamount. They are tan, not black. I did a little Google searching and found one documented case of a mountain lion killed in 1969, but few other documented reports until back in the 1920s.
I’m open to the remote possibility that there are a few wild mountain lions in remote areas of the state. If there are a few there, I’d think it’s more likely they are wide-ranging individuals that have traveled in from contiguous states, rather than a sustainably large breeding population.
However, there clearly aren’t enough to account for even a fraction of the sightings. Every third person in the South has a story about hearing a “black panther scream just like a woman” out in the woods somewhere. Sorry, but it’s horse puckey. You’d have to have more mountain lions in the South than anywhere else in the world to account for all the sightings. You get more people with fantastic mountain lion stories in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia, where there are few or none, than you get out West, where we actually know they exist.
bd
Okay Zach, you officially owe me an apology for almost giving me a coronary.
When I put up my last post about an hour ago, I was still at the office.
Even that relatively large area could support only 8-16 cats. For comparison, the park has 1600-1800 black bears.
Excellent point. A couple things to keep in mind:
First, nearly every time one of these cougar sightings is “confirmed,” it means that either: (a) some moron has shot one; or (b) one got run over by a car. If you’ve only got 16 in the Park, how long do you think it would take for the local brain trust to kill off a significant number? With that few, every individual’s death is a huge loss. Big cats don’t breed quickly enough to offset that.
Second, eight to 16 animals is hardly enough for a sustainable population over a long period of time: inbreeding will become a huge problem genetically. Read about some of the genetic problems that have sprung up among the isolated cheetah populations in Africa. The Florida panther population is down to less than 70 breeding individuals, and wildlife management officials recently transplanted some Texas cougars there for the same reason – to help dilute the gene pool.
Anyway, since we’re getting into cryptozoology today, how many of you Arkansas guys worry about getting eaten by the White River Monster when you’re wading for trout?
http://littlerock.about.com/cs/urbanlegends/a/aaghosts.htm
Lots of people swear they’ve seen Whitey, so it must be true. 😉
bd
An escaped exotic pet seems plausible to me…
The “escaped pet” theory comes up a lot, but it’s not credible to me.
Sorry, but if someone says they saw a “black panther,” it should be given the same credibility as someone who says they saw Bigfoot or a monster in the White River.
If there are any cougars left in the South, they are extremely rare. It would be astoundingly against the odds to have an extremely rare animal and it happens to have an extremely rare melanistic mutation.
People who track cougar sightings use the “was it black?” question as a flag to rule out the bogus ones.
BD –
Now, now, Brian, how many times have you poled anything? 🙂
Dirty jokes aside… 😮
When I carp fish on Old Hickory, I pole my boat across the mud flats to avoid the commotion caused by a trolling motor. It may not be elegant, but it works. The main disadvantage is not the pole itself – it’s that I’m usually fishing alone, and I haven’t yet developed a good method for switching from pole to flyrod without wasting a lot of time. So I wind up missing shots at some fish, but overall it still works. If only I could find some gullible tag-along to pole the boat while I fished, it would be a perfect system. (As a side note, I think I just thought of a wonderful opportunity for you to practice your push poling…
