Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.
The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.
Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)
Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.
Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.
The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.
Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.
However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.
Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.
By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.
It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.
But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.
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Pain In The Bud 
Holy cow! A piece of toast sold for that much? So in other words humans are dumber than we thought?
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I vaguely remembered the story but when I looked it up to put the link in this post, I was just as surprised that it sold for $28k.
There was also a burrito that people thought had an image of the BVM, and other bizarre examples over the years.
Of course the question is: Why would God (or his mother) appear on a grilled cheese sandwich?
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Exactly! Just imagine what that kind of money can do. Feed children who go to bed hungry. Animals in need. Etc.
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I hate to break it to the person that bought that Grilled Cheese for 28,000. There’s NO way the Virgin Mary is on that Sammy. It’s Michelle Pfeiffer from the movie Ladyhawk (I LOVE that movie, btw). It looks just like the movie’s poster! Google the movie and it’s right there. It was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the picture of said Sammy.
And the guy who was ambushed by a Puma? Seriously?? Just how could he think it was a big cat? It would’ve been pretty heavy if it landed on his head, (yeah I know, my cat’s feel like they weigh a ton when they stand on my stomach). A Puma would’ve been crushingly heavy on his shoulders, don’t ya think?. Also, if it had been an ACTUAL Puma,, I really don’t think he’d have gotten just some scratches to show for it. Pretty sure there would’ve been biting and gouging, plus a lot of blood. I bet the guys that were doing the DNA sequencing and the Cop that got the call were laughing their asses off at this. I know I wouldn’t have been able not to laugh! And that cat went back to his buddies and got a huge round of high fives! 🤣
Man, people are getting dumber every day. 🤦♀️
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Oops, I might need to have a talk with some of our kitties, the ones I’ve called “house mini- panthers”. They’re confused because all cougars are called “panthers” here, and in other rural areas. (There’s a song, “Panther in Michigan”.) Also called a derivative term, painters). Interesting post! Fb state wildlife pages used to have many reports about panthers supposedly sighted. Regular as well as black. They made a rule against that. Now you have to join those pages. There are lots of fairly well documented reports of black bobcats online.
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I’ve gotten into the habit of always calling them pumas on first reference and as the primary name, since the taxonym is puma concolor and so many people confuse mountain lions with African lions.
Those black puma sightings can go in the pile with reports of Big Foot, Nessie, the leopards of the UK countryside, and UFOs.
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I don’t know if this is a thing, or if it happens just to me.
Sometimes I’ll look down from my upstairs bathroom window, and see a cat roaming my backyard. Not usually the same cat. But whichever and whatever cat, they always seem to look huhYOOGE (although not jaguar huge from that vantage point.
If I’m on the first floor, and see one in the yard, they look pretty much like the size they actually are.
Odd.
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Is there anything in your backyard that provides spatial/dimensional context? It seems like it’s usually that sort of thing that throws our brains off.
On a somewhat related note, I have not seen a stray cat in my neighborhood for at least 3 years.
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I’m not sure these are strays. Unfortunately it’s VERY common for people in New Jersey to let their cats be indoor/outdoor cats.
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