Sparked by yesterday's post on "The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense," Chas Clifton sent me a clip about two big cats which were reportedly caught on camera by rangers doing a deer population survey on Dartmoor in the U.K.
Skeptical, I noted that:
"My bet is that these are lurchers. Time will tell. You will note that no one seems to have reported a missing Big Cat, these animals were seen at night in a car while wearing Infrared or Low Light googgles, etc.
Known Big Cats that have escaped zoos in the U.S. or the U.K. before (a recent example can be found here) are typically located or shot deead within a week. A breeding population of such animals would require: 1) several animals escaped at once; 2) of the same species; 3) different sexes; 3) in the same area with no mortality or infecundity, and; 4) no reporting of the escape and no inquiry as to "whatever happened to your lions?"
A quick search turned up the video, shown above, of one of the supposed Big Cats running around Dartmoor.
Dartmoor, of course, is the location that supposedly inspired the original "Hound of the Baskervilles" story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
More than a hundred years have gone by since then, and no "Hell Hounds" or Big Cats have yet turned up, but perhaps this one is different.
And yet, one look at the video and more than a little skepticism rears its head. As always, the video is more than grainy and out of focus, and nothing can be seen other than an outline of something moving across an indistinct background.
And what is the outline of?
Not a Cheetah, not a Leopard, not a Mountain Lion, not a Tiger.
No, the outline (if we are to believe it is a large cat at all) is of an adult male African Lion with a full mane.
Or not.
Perhaps it's just a Leonberger dog.
Or a sheep dog with a strange hair cut.
Or a Wildebeest. Or a pony. Or a house cat shot with forced perspective.
It could be anything.
I would venture that the least likely explanation is that two full-grown African lions are patrolling Dartmoor, sight unseen for more than six weeks, and without any reports to officials about any escaped zoo animals.
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4 comments:
We had a lion in WV, too.
Several years a hunter came across one.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1918207/posts
If there were lions in Greenbrier County, they wouldn't last long. The Second Amendment is well-used down there.
They even had a big cat zoo's owners come down there and try to catch it with some raw chicken carcasses.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know what animal is in your video. There is no way of knowing the size of the animal relative to the surroundings, and to make matters worse, the resolution on the camera is terrible.
Has anyone suggested that there is a breeding population? I have not heard such -- merely speculation about escaped or released cats, whichever.
But a panther, for instance, could easily live a decade or more in the wild, no?
I had to laugh when I saw that you posited that it could be a Leonberger because... that was one of the first things that went through my mind when I saw the video. And seriously. How many people see this and immediately think "Oh, that's a Leonberger"?
I lived with Leos for a decade and a young, fit dog runs full out much like that. If one trimmed the coat on the dog's body short or put a fake haavy mane on it you could quite easily shoot crappy video and pass it off as a lion.
True story. One time as I drove the Volvo through one of a toll booth in Chicago with both boys lounging in the back a stunned toll attendant looked into my car and started yelling "Lions! She has LIONS in her car! There are LIONS IN THAT CAR!!!" I just smiled at him and drove off.
So I pointed another artist friend who partly grew up in Kenya and knows all the African big cats very well at the video and his take is that the animal looks like a great dane with a mane tied to its neck. FWIW.
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