ghost cat – Pain In The Bud

A UK couple say they narrowly avoided hitting a big cat that bolted in front of their car Wednesday morning.

Chris and Marion said they were driving on the A303 in Hampshire, a rural road in southern England surrounded by farmland, fields and wooded stretches, at 7 a.m. when the felid leapt across the road and ran into a nearby field, possibly giving chase to prey. While others suggested it could have been a lynx — which went extinct in the UK more than 1,000 years ago — the witnesses ruled out the possibility, saying the cat was “twice the size of a fox” with a tail that was “thick and solid.”

When they made a Facebook post about the encounter, several others claimed they’ve seen a similar-looking “big cat” moving through Hampshire’s fields. There are several groups dedicated to alleged big cat sightings in the UK on Facebook.

It’s the latest in a surprisingly persistent legend of phantom big cats prowling the British countryside. There are no extant big cats in the UK or in Europe. They exist only on other continents: Lions and leopards in Africa, tigers and leopards in Asia, and jaguars in South America. Among felids that are not true big cats but are often grouped with them, pumas exist only in the Americas and cheetahs are exclusively found in Africa.

Despite that, hundreds of witnesses report seeing feliform animals much larger than well-fed ferals or small wildcats. A similar phenomenon exists in Australia, where for years people have insisted they’ve seen big cats slinking through the bush.

“Ghost Cat” illustration by Ken Jovi Credit: Ken Jovi/Artstation

While it’s possible that people in the British countryside or Australian bush are illegally keeping large felids, and it’s possible that a handful could have escaped over the decades, that’s an unlikely explanation for the sightings for several reasons. While big cats are apex predators, animals who have lived in captivity all their lives and have been given food will not know where to go or how to hunt. In places like Texas, where as many as 5,000 tigers live in backyard enclosures, escaped cats are quickly spotted wandering human neighborhoods, confused and looking for food.

If an escaped tiger or leopard was somehow able to rapidly adjust to the English countryside and fend for itself without being spotted, there would be evidence — pug marks, droppings, claw marks denoting territorial boundaries on trees, the carcasses of prey animals, burglarized pens, farm animals missing and terrorized.

That goes double if, as some suggest, there is a breeding population of panthera genus cats. Even a handful of such animals would consume thousands of pounds of meat each week.

Still, as Wednesday’s alleged sighting proves, rumors of large cats stalking the mists of the English countryside are unlikely to die out any time soon.

A Festivus for the Rest of Us…And Our Cats

Festivus is the celebration that keeps on giving.

The operators of Tail Town Cats, a cat cafe in Pasadena, California, are hosting a Festivus get-together that will double as a showcase for adoptable kitties and a way to help support adoption efforts.

Hosted by a cat named Art Vandelay — who found his forever home through the cafe — the celebration will include a traditional Festivus pole, the Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strength. (Among the grievances listed in advance are general disappointment with the frequency of treats, displeasure at sharing litter boxes, and humans who recycle cardboard boxes instead of giving them to the felines.)

People in the Los Angeles area can attend in person, while others can watch online.

Seinfeld fans will recognize Art Vandelay as George Costanza’s most frequently-used alias. Vandelay is alternately described as an importer-exporter or as an architect. As George famously said: “I’ve always wanted to pretend to be an architect.”

As for Festivus, it’s taken on a life of its own 25 years after it was popularized on Seinfeld.

The made-up holiday had its humble origins in the home of writer Daniel O’Keefe, who introduced it to the nation — and immortalized it in the process — by writing it into “The Strike,” a 1997 episode of the sitcom. At the time, Seinfeld was a ratings juggernaut, averaging more than 30 million viewers an episode. Festivus is celebrated annually on Dec. 23.

A Redditor believes she caught the ghost of her late cat on camera a year to do the day after he died.

Aw, shit. If this is true, you know what it means, don’t you?

I’ll never escape Buddy and his incessant meowing for more Temptations. I’m condemned to live out my existence hearing “Mrrrrrrrppp! YUMS NOW!” from spectral Buddies who will continue to demand turkey and turkey-flavored treats even in the afterlife.

I shall be a servant forever, scooping phantom poop out of a litter box and serving wet food to a nonexistent cat like a madman.

All jokes aside, people who read this blog know I’m a skeptic, and I don’t think it’s coincidence that every example of allegedly supernatural and extraterrestrial phenomena — from “ghosts” popping up on camera to “UFOs” tracking on military IR — can only be seen in grainy, low-resolution footage.

We are humans, after all, given to superstition and genetically hardwired to see patterns everywhere, even where there aren’t any. That’s precisely what’s happening when, for example, we see faces and familiar shapes in clouds. (We also have a long, repeatedly proven tendency to invent explanations for phenomena when none are forthcoming.)

So it’s with a grain of salt that I present to you this clip, which one Reddit user believes may show her late cat lazing on her living room sofa precisely one year to the day after passing away:

Not sure if this can be explained but I caught what looks like my cat Blackjack, who passed away almost exactly a year ago, materialising on our sofa (far left) when I turned the lights on from my phone. There was nothing black on the sofa just the pillows that are red, grey and cream
byu/Chlochan inNukesTop5

As you can see in the video, one of the woman’s living cats drops down from near the window and pads in the direction of the front door as she walks in. But on the couch a shadow starts to take shape, gaining definition in the dark until the woman flips on the lights and the shape becomes well-defined.

The Redditor says she believes the shape could be Blackjack, her late all-black kitty. As you can see in the footage, she appears to look right at the phantom feline, but she says she didn’t see anything until she was reviewing cam footage from May 24, the day it was recorded.

The shape is certainly convincing, but keeping in mind Occam’s Razor — favoring the explanation with the fewest assumptions, or “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” — what I see is the shadow of an object that, when viewed from a particular angle, happens to look like a cat. The mind looks for a pattern, so we see a cat.

That explanation also makes the most sense with the surrounding context: The shadow didn’t become solid until the lights flipped on, and the woman didn’t notice anything amiss when she was looking straight at the couch in the video. If we’re seeing a shadow that only looks like a cat from the right angle, it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t see anything strange from her vantage point.

Her kitties don’t react either, which they’d almost certainly do if another cat simply materialized in front of them.

“That most certainly looks like a cat,” one user wrote, “but hey, I’m no expert, I’m just some idiot on Reddit [who] enjoys strange memes.”

Note: Buddy doesn’t have an opinion on this, but he would like you to know he’s absolutely NOT hiding behind my legs while producing faint, terrified mews.