Otway Panther Photographed

Emily's Cat said:
Lynxes have pointed ears
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Lynxes and bobcats have ears that are pointed and end with a little tuft. They also have fairly prominent sideburns. They're pretty easy to distinguish from a domestic cat at any scale. More so if you see the whole cat, as they're very leggy and have big feet. Lynxes and bobcats also share the short bobbed tail. Canada lynxes have longer legs and bigger feet, and their ears are more pointed and tufted than a regular bobcat. This is a critter optimally evolved to hunt in the snow.

The pictures I've seen of pumas show that their ears are more rounded than you'd expect from a puddy tat, but they're closer, so confusion might be possible at the right angle, blur, and so forth.
 
p0lka said:
I'm confused

Look at the background of the photo, the yellow flowers and the grass, the reference scale seems to be right there for me, hence my first post saying the buttercups must be massive.
The cat isn't.
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Not buttercups - sunflowers.

Mind. Blown.:jaw-dropp
 
I thought the photo would be way better than what it was.

In fact, I snorted my coffee, outward, through my nose, when I saw the obvious housecat.
 
It's most likely a domestic tom that hasn't been neutered. They tend to grow to about twice the size of a neutered tom.

To someone who doesn't know that, or has never seen one, the size can be quite shocking.
 
p0lka said:
I'm confused





Look at the background of the photo, the yellow flowers and the grass, the reference scale seems to be right there for me, hence my first post saying the buttercups must be massive.
The cat isn't.
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Oh, I know there's scale in the photo. My question was more about the biology of the thing.
 
wollery said:
It's most likely a domestic tom that hasn't been neutered. They tend to grow to about twice the size of a neutered tom.

To someone who doesn't know that, or has never seen one, the size can be quite shocking.
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Citation? Any source I've seen, and yes our Bengal is neutered, says neutering has no effect on physical development, including height and weight.
 
catsmate said:
Citation? Any source I've seen, and yes our Bengal is neutered, says neutering has no effect on physical development, including height and weight.
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The only sources I can find compare cats neutered before puberty to those neutered after.

I'm talking about wild toms who never get neutered, (and only from my experience) they are significantly larger and more muscular with rounder faces and thicker necks (okay, twice the size might have been an exaggeration), but it can take three or four years to reach this size.
 
For a feral cat, from a long-time feral population, size is probably an evolutionary advantage. On the other hand it doesn't seem like all-black coloration would be, although they may be largely nocturnal.
 
wollery said:
It's most likely a domestic tom that hasn't been neutered. They tend to grow to about twice the size of a neutered tom.

To someone who doesn't know that, or has never seen one, the size can be quite shocking.
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I've had a couple of unneutered toms, and they weren't significantly bigger than the neutered ones I had. Small sample size, I know. If anything neutered toms tend to get fatter than unneutered.
 
The Shrike said:
What on Earth is leading people to think this is anything other than a typical-sized house cat?
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Panthers in Australia is a myth. It has some cultish following and promotion like Bigfoot does.

It is quite possible that the photographer knew that it was a black house cat but felt that a particular photo might serve to continue the fantasy dream of panthers living in the wilds of Oz.

I don't think there are any published photos of panthers in Oz that show anything other than something that isn't a panther. I've never seen any.

This branch of the pseudoscientific realm of cryptozoology is sometimes known as ABC. Alien Big Cats - these are the largest of the cat family living wild in places where they don't live in the wild. It's a panther in Australia and a puma in Britain. That sort of thing. In America, the main popular ABC is the cougar (puma) living wild in the East - way outside of its established range. For spice they will tell you all about black pumas in the East and South.

We have some good old threads with discussions on ABCs.
 
Florida Panthers actually do live in Florida. Puma Concolor lived throughout nearly all of the Americas at one point, but are either severaly reduced in population or extinct through most of the Eastern US, and never had a broad range in Canada.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Florida Panthers actually do live in Florida.
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Nobody would disagree.

Puma Concolor lived throughout nearly all of the Americas at one point, but are either severaly reduced in population or extinct through most of the Eastern US, and never had a broad range in Canada.
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There's no functional evidence of continued existence in the East even for a small population. They have been declared extinct for very good reason. They aren't there.
 
It's interesting to me that the ABC folks have not pulled the biggest of the big cats into their fold. Tigers and African lions are very rare or nonexistent in the claims and claimed encounters with ABCs. It always seems to be a "panther" or a "puma" being claimed.

This may be because photos of house cats and dogs won't really inspire anyone to say, "Yes, that's a tiger" or "Yes, that's an African lion." So I think that a believing following for that claim maybe can't be easily established.

IOW, it's harder to hoax a tiger or lion because you can't just use a house cat or a dog like you can with panthers and pumas.

I'm speculating.
 
William Parcher said:
Nobody would disagree.


There's no functional evidence of continued existence in the East even for a small population. They have been declared extinct for very good reason. They aren't there.
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Yes, there's every good reason to consider the Eastern puma extinct. But there have also been some well confirmed instances of Western pumas at least visiting the east, and they travel far. So we have some. They're just not ours, and nobody seems to know where they call home. The one that was run over in Connecticut a few years ago had been seen all over, and traced back to New York State as well. But there's no doubt that it was genetically a western one.
 
bruto said:
But there have also been some well confirmed instances of Western pumas at least visiting the east, and they travel far. So we have some. They're just not ours, and nobody seems to know where they call home.
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You have young males that wandered all the way from the Badlands where they were born looking for females that they will never ever find because they are all still way back there in the Badlands (the Dakotas). The females don't wander. Young males have to wander because established older males drive them out. The goal of the young male is to walk until he finds an available female and then try to establish his own territory in the context of her.

If he walks east from the Badlands then he will not be finding any females even if he walks all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.


and nobody seems to know where they call home.
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They have no home, so to speak. They left home and will now walk endlessly until they find a mate. But that won't happen unless they walk back to the Badlands.
 
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