![]() Engel kept the animal’s tail as a trophy, which was 60cm long – roughly twice the length of a regular domestic cat’s tail. He estimated the cat was about 1.5m long. In 2005, a deer hunter, Kurt Engel, shot dead what he believed to be a black panther near Sale, in east Gippsland. “If you see a domestic cat that maybe weighs something like 10kg, which is about twice what most pet cats weigh … your initial impression might be: gee, that’s a big animal,” Menkhorst says. To the untrained eye, accurately estimating the size of an animal after a fleeting sighting is a difficult task, says Peter Menkhorst, an ecologist at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research in Melbourne.įeral domestic cats – Felis catus – can occasionally reach impressive sizes, and have been behind at least some reported big cat sightings. ‘If you see a domestic cat … your initial impression might be: gee, that’s a big animal.’ Photograph: Russotwins/Alamy ![]() In the last century, rumours of wild big cats have also been fuelled by stories of escaped circus animals such as lions and tigers, and American soldiers bringing exotic pets into the country as military mascots. It was stuffed and remains on display at the Tantanoola hotel. Equally misplaced in the Australian bush, the wolf was hypothesised to have been a boat stowaway that survived a shipwreck off the coast. The beast turned out not to be a felid, but a Eurasian wolf. The Tantanoola tiger, as it became known, was eventually caught. Classified ads of the day offered leopard and panther cubs for sale. The exotic animal trade was widespread in the late 19th century, Waldron says. In the 1890s, panic erupted in the South Australian town of Tantanoola, when stories emerged of a predator stalking properties, terrifying farming dogs and slaughtering sheep. A sailor said he had found “a cat-like animal with orange fur, black stripes down its back and white tufted ears, hunting for marsupial rats near a body of water”. The earliest reported phantom cat sighting Waldron has identified was near Adelaide, in 1836. Large felids have been rumoured to prowl the Australian bush for nearly 200 years, says David Waldron, a folklorist and historian at Federation University. Sightings of mysterious cats in the wild – and accompanying reports of strange livestock deaths – are not a new phenomenon. “I look at every video that’s been posted on the group,” Lansbury says. Members post a mixture of blurry images and footage, videos of big cats clearly taken in other countries, and avowed testimonies of personal encounters.
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