Tag: South America

The UK’s Big Cats Are Just Like UFOs, Existing In Blurry Photos And Human Imagination

Blurry photos and fleeting encounters keep the legend of big cats in the UK alive. Could there be leopards, pumas and other large cats roaming the countryside?

For all the advances in optics and camera technology over the last 20 years alone, there are two kinds of people who love blurry, low-resolution footage: UFO enthusiasts and people who are convinced the UK is like a cold, rainy Africa with big cats lurking in every bush and field.

To be a member of either group you’ve got to shut down critical thinking faculties, suspend disbelief and put faith in the highly improbable. (Or the impossible when it comes to people who insist little green men are zipping across the night sky in sleek ships that defy all we know about physics and aerodynamics.)

The UK’s big cat believers claim the country is home to a thriving native population of large felids. Some of them think they’re “panthers,” not specifying which species of cat they think is out there, while others claim jaguars, leopards or tigers are prowling the English countryside, spotted only fleetingly at the edges of fields or in the brush, and only by people who own two-decade-old Nokia flip phones with rudimentary cameras.

They believe a native, breeding population not only exists, but for centuries has eluded capture and avoided leaving compelling evidence.

Cheetah in London
“Pardon me, mate, could you point me toward Aldersgate Street?”

The phantom cats have remarkable stealth abilities. They’ve never tripped a trail camera or appeared in a single frame of CCTV footage. Not a single tree marked for territory, not a single pile of cow bones picked clean by giant barbed tongues, not a single clump of panthera dung. Not even a hungry cub drawn into a village by the smell of barbecue on a summer night.

The reported sightings say more about human capacity for imagination — and how poor we are at estimating size over distance — than they do about the crypto-pumas and melanistic tigers some people swear they’ve seen.

When alleged big cats are spotted in the UK, they’re always seen fleetingly and from afar. When witnesses try to confirm what they’ve seen, the animals are gone.

“I was coming up to Jolly Nice from Oxford at around 7.50pm and the car in front of me was travelling at a steady pace. I looked to the verge of the other side of the road because I saw a bright pair of eyes low down. Upon further inspection, I suddenly realised there was a large outline of a low and stocky cat that was huge.”

That’s the testimony of a UK man who told the Stroud Times, a local newspaper, that he encountered a big cat a few minutes before 8 p.m. on Friday in Nailsworth, a town of about 5,600 people a little more than 100 miles west of London. His description mirrors that of others who say they’ve spotted large felids, mostly in the UK’s countryside and small villages.

Small Cats Looking Big
Photograph from a previous “big cat sighting.” It’s typical of the photos that surface with claims of leopards and pumas stalking the countryside. Blurred details and digital zoom make it difficult to gauge distance and scale.

The story’s headline reads: “Big cat expert’s verdict: beast spotted was a leopard.”

The expert in question is Rick Minter, an amateur biologist who has made UK big cat legends into something of a cottage industry by publishing books, hosting a podcast and frequently speaking to newspapers about the phenomenon. It’s not clear how Minter decided the animal in Friday’s sighting was a “black leopard,” but he’s said in previous interviews that he believes most alleged big cat sightings in the UK are leopards, with pumas accounting for most of the others.

Neither animal is native to Europe. Pumas range from South America to the American northwest and midwest, with isolated populations in places like Florida. Leopards are native to Africa and Asia, with ranges that overlap with lions on the former continent and tigers on the latter, mostly in India.

Puma at Buckingham Palace
“I’m originally from San Diego, actually, but the expat life suits me and the British are very tasty.”

Some have floated the possibility that the mysterious felids are escaped pets who have successfully adjusted to the countryside. Minter says the evidence points to breeding populations.

If there are thriving populations, the cats would need to exist in numbers, with at least 50 on the extreme low end. If they’re escaped pets, the authorities would know.

Unlike the US, where big cat ownership was banned in the vast majority of states even before the recent Big Cat Public Safety Act was passed, owning a massive carnivore slash killing machine isn’t illegal in the UK. But owners have to register their animals, seek approval for the habitats and enclosures they’ve built, and submit to annual inspection.

There have been a handful of escapes over the decades and each time the authorities were able to capture or kill the animals, often tracking them via livestock kills. Pet tigers and leopards might be dangerous, but they’re still at a disadvantage compared to their wild brethren, meaning they go for the easy, guaranteed kills when they’re hungry. Nothing’s easier than a docile farm animal that’s never seen a big cat.

Tiger at a pub
“Oi, wanna have a pint and watch Man U vs Arsenal on the telly?”

More recently, big cat hunters in the UK have tried to find more compelling evidence than a couple of blurry photographs of house cats out for a stroll. They’ve touted suspicious-looking pug marks, and in August 2022 found black fur on a barbed wire fence. According to the believers, a UK lab confirmed the fur belonged to a leopard, but there was no chain of custody, no documentation of how the sample was found and handled. Big cat experts remain skeptical.

Indeed, Oxford’s Egil Droge, a wildlife conservationist, points out that in places where big cats live, you don’t have to go hunting for evidence. It’s everywhere.

“I’ve worked with large carnivores in Africa since 2007 and it’s obvious if big cats are around. You would regularly come across prints of their paws along roads. The rasping sound of a leopard’s roar can be heard from several kilometres,” Droge wrote, noting that leopards in particular are not discriminating about what they kill and leave ample evidence of their handiwork when they’ve hunted.

Still, as improbable as the sightings are, the big cat enthusiasts of the UK have one up on UFO enthusiasts and hunters of cryptics like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and the Jersey Devil: the creatures they’re looking for actually exist and may surprise us yet.

UPDATED: Monkeys Go Missing From Dallas Zoo Weeks After Clouded Leopard Freed From Habitat

Authorities believe the person or people who stole the monkeys intend to sell them as pets or breeding animals.

UPDATE, 2/1/2023: A tip led police to an empty home in Lancaster, Texas, about 15 miles from the zoo. The missing tamarins were found inside a closet and were unharmed, per CNN. They were returned to the zoo and examined by veterinarians.

Police still want to speak to an unidentified man (see story below) who was seen on zoo grounds, but they haven’t said what the man was doing or how he may be connected to the thefts. The abduction of the tamarins follows two other incidents of breached enclosures at the zoo, and the theft of 12 squirrel monkeys from Zoosiana in Broussard, Louisiana, this weekend.

Original story, 1/31/2023:

Dallas police released a photo of a “person of interest” they’d like to speak to after a pair of emperor tamarin monkeys went missing from their enclosure in the Dallas Zoo, the latest of three incidents in which animal habitats at the zoo were breached by human hands.

The first incident happened on Jan. 13 when zookeepers noticed a three-year-old clouded leopard named Nova was missing from her enclosure. They found a breach in the mesh netting that serves as one of enclosure barriers, and said it was a clean, intentional cut with a blade, not from the animals.

After a frantic search — and multiple appeals to the public informing people the leopard was not dangerous and should not be shot — zookeepers found Nova hiding in a tree on the zoo grounds, not far from her enclosure. Nova’s sister, Luna, lives in the same enclosure and remained there.

That same day, staff at the zoo also found another breach, this time at the langur exhibit. Langurs are old-world, leaf-eating monkeys native to Asia. None of the monkeys were missing, but the discovery strengthened the suspicion that someone had tried to steal Nova and at least one monkey, but were not successful.

Now it appears that same person or a copycat has been successful in another habitat. On Jan. 30, zookeepers found a breach in a habitat that hold’s the zoo’s emperor tamarin monkeys. Two of the monkeys were missing.

Tamarins are tiny arboreal new world monkeys that have become popular pets due to “influencers” popularizing them on sites like Youtube and celebrities purchasing them.

tamarinwithbabies
A tamarin mother with her babies. Primate babies are virtually attached to their mothers for the first years of their lives

There are an estimated 15,000 monkeys living as pets in the US, and some species fetch up to $7,500 as infants, when they’re violently “pulled” from their mothers when they’re just days old and sold. Most are temporary pets, lasting up to two years before docile, adorable infants become destructive, resentful juveniles and the “owners” decide to cut their losses. Buying monkeys as pets and subsequently abandoning them has become so common that sanctuary spots are at a premium, with a handful of sanctuaries taking thousands of monkeys annually.

Some people buy new babies every year or two, shipping the “old” ones off to sanctuaries — or simply dumping them in the woods where they don’t know how to fend for themselves — and repeating the process of infantalizing newly-purchased monkeys. Macaques, capuchins, marmosets and tamarins are the most popular monkeys kept as pets.

Despite the appeal to some people, humans cannot meet the social or environmental needs of monkeys, who naturally live in troops with complex social hierarchies and relationships.

“Monkeys are not surrogate children, and they’re not little people,” the Humane Society’s Debbie Leahy told the New York Post in a 2013 story.

“Pulling” monkeys from their mothers traumatizes infants and the mothers, and there is a wealth of data from primate maternal deprivation studies — going all the way back to the cruel experiments of psychologist Harry Harlow — documenting the psychological damage done to the animals when they’re removed from their mothers and troops.

“If you try to keep them as pets you’re creating a mentally disturbed animal in 99.9 percent of the cases,” Kevin Wright, director of conservation, science and sanctuary at Phoenix Zoo told National Geographic. “The animal will never be able to fit in any other home. Never learn how to get along with other monkeys. And, more often than not, will end up with a lot of behavioral traits that are self-destructive.”

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A rhesus monkey baby, already separated from its mother at just a few days old.

Tamarins, which are often called “pocket monkeys” by people who keep them as pets, can fetch up to $5,000 apiece, generally less than larger primates like capuchins or macaques. Demand for macaques has skyrocketed since the pandemic, as laboratories test various drugs on the old world monkeys, and prices for infants have risen as well.

Despite officials at Dallas Zoo installing additional cameras and increasingly patrols on the grounds at night, an intruder or intruders were able to evade detection and successfully remove the animals some time between Sunday night and Monday morning.

Police have released an image of a man who was seen strolling through the zoo and have asked for the public’s help identifying him so detectives can speak with him. Police did not say why they believe the man, who is pictured wearing a hooded jacket and eating Doritos, would have information on the missing animals or what his role might be.

close up photo of a tamarin monkey
An emperor tamarin. Credit: Nathan J Hilton/Pexels

Humans Are An Alien Invasive Species, New Study By Feline Science Institute Finds

Humans are an invasive species who are spectacularly adept at destroying life, a new study has found.

Homo sapiens are an invasive species who do irreparable harm to the environment and other animals on an unprecedented scale, a new study by the Feline Science Institute has found.

The results prompted feline scientists to add homo sapiens, commonly known as humans, to a database of destructive and invasive animals maintained by the Academy of Scientific Studies.

Cat scientists have only just glimpsed the breadth of human-initiated impact on other animals, Dr. Oreo P. Yums, lead author of the newest research paper, told reporters.

“We found humans are astonishingly, almost indescribably destructive,” Yums said. “For instance, although they fret about birds, humans kill more than a billion of them a year just with their skyscrapers, which birds are prone to fly into due to their mirrored surfaces. Add in wind turbines, cell towers, power lines, habitat loss and slow die-offs due to chemicals, and by conservative estimates we’re talking about billions of birds killed by humans every year without even tallying active measures like hunting.”

Humans have killed off an estimated 70 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last 50 years alone and show no sign of stopping. Oceans are overfished, animals like pangolins and big cats are ruthlessly hunted to extinction to feed demand within the Chinese traditional medicine market, and human addiction to palm oil means the “two-legged demon monsters don’t even have sympathy for their fellow primates,” mewologist Charles Clawin said.

“In Borneo and Sumatra there are entire schools, filled to capacity, for critically endangered orangutan babies who were orphaned by human contractors clearing ancient jungles to make room for more palm oil plantations,” he said. “Often, the humans use industrial equipment to tear down trees while the orangutans are still in them. Other times, they dispatch the mothers with pistols, not realizing there are babies clinging to them.”

In Africa, where the elephant population has plummeted in the last century, more than 110,000 elephants have been slaughtered in the past 10 years alone for their tusks. The elongated incisors are used to make jewelry and piano keys, and items made from ivory have become a status symbol in China, where growing middle and upper classes seek to show off their wealth with luxuries.

In 2019, Chinese businesswoman Yang Felan, dubbed the “Ivory Queen,” was arrested and charged with smuggling $2.5 million worth of tusks from Tanzania to her home country. Yang, “a key link between poachers in East Africa and buyers in China for more than a decade,” was a respected businesswoman, investor, restaurateur and vice chairwoman of the China-Africa Business Council.

“Poachers continue to slaughter elephants and our big cat brothers and sisters,” said Luna Meowson, who tracks the illegal wildlife market for the University of Nappington. “Having extirpated tigers from virtually their entire range, poachers are turning to South America, where jaguar poaching increased 200 fold between 2015 and 2020. It never stops.”

Big Bruce the Lion Slayer
A human hunter poses victoriously after heroically slaying a lion (panthera leo) from atop his trusty steed, a mobility scooter, after a team of guides drove him around the bush in an air-conditioned SUV, then lured the animal directly into his line of sight. A female of the species, presumably his mate, looks on proudly.

Although the earliest details remain murky, fossil records show Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago. The invasive species, which has a gestation period of about nine months, began rapidly breeding and immediately went to war with fellow members of the genus Homo.

After wiping out two-legged rivals including Homo neanderthalensis, Homo altaiensis, Homo denisova and Homo bodoensis, the victorious Homo sapiens set their eyes on other species. Throughout their history they’ve also proven remarkably adept at murdering themselves and continue to hone their skills.

“Those OG humans, they had to really work at slaughtering other species and extirpating wildlife,” said Chonkmatic the Magnificent, King of North American cats. “They didn’t have attack helicopters, stealth bombers, tanks, carrier battle groups, daisy cutters, artillery, mortars, phosphorous, napalm, biological weapons, or even small arms like rifles. In those days a pimply kid from Oklahoma sitting in an air-conditioned base in Virginia couldn’t wipe out an entire city 5,000 miles away by pressing a button ordering a drone to drop a nuke. They had to put some sweat into violence, you know?”

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Breakthroughs in recent centuries have led to innovative and more convenient ways for Homo sapiens to author mass destruction and render entire sections of the Earth lifeless.

The species, known for its aptitude for tool-making in addition to eating ultra-processed foods and staring at screens, began with simple tools of destruction like the Mark I Spear, early bows and even torches. Over the centuries they innovated, coming up with clever and inventive new ways to inflict pain and end life until the advent of electricity, the industrial era and the brutally destructive war machines of modern times.

Human scientists have tried to obscure their species’ impact on wildlife and the planet by declaring species like felis catus “invasive” and “alien,” but even if cats are “guilty of grabbing a forbidden snack every now and then,” they don’t have the coordination, technology or will to carve up habitats, render entire swaths of the Earth uninhabitable with nuclear fallout, create Everest-size mountains of garbage, or effortlessly drive millions of species to extinction, Clawin said.

“They’re so good at it, they don’t even have to try,” he noted, pointing out human accidents or incidents of negligence like oil spills and chemical run-off into rivers. “We tend to think of humans out there with shotguns and rifles, cackling maniacally as they shoot anything that moves. And, sure, they do that, especially in places like Texas where the sight of any animal always prompts the question ‘Should we shoot it?’ But our research shows they can wipe out entire categories of fauna in their sleep. It’s remarkable.”

Additional reading: Polish institute classifies cats as alien invasive species

What’s The Difference Between A Puma, Mountain Lion, Cougar, Panther and Catamount?

The puma is known by more names than any other mammal, a fact that reflects its incredible resilience and wide range.

The puma goes by a lot of names. So many, in fact, that it holds the Guinness world record for the mammal with the most names, with more than 40 monikers in English alone.

Add the puma’s various appellations in Spanish and the indigenous tongues of south north America, and the large golden cat has probably had at least 100 names by a conservative estimate.

Cougar, panther, mountain lion, catamount, Florida panther, Carolina panther, ghost cat, gato monte, cuguacuarana, painter, screamer — they’re all names for puma concolor, a felid with the size of big cats in the panthera genus but genetics more closely related to non-roaring “small” cats, including felis catus.

Indeed, although pumas are famously capable of the wild cat “scream,” they’re able to purr just like house cats and their small- to medium-size wild relatives.

Why does the puma have so many monikers?

Mostly it’s because the adaptable, elusive feline has a vast range that historically covered almost the entirety of two continents:

Cougar_range_map_2010
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Even today cougars exist in healthy numbers across most of South America and the western United States. They’re wanderers, with pockets of smaller populations in places like Florida and the midwest, and individual mountain lions have been spotted as far east as New York and Connecticut. (The New York region known as the Catskills, derived from “cat creek” in Dutch, was named after pumas when the area was part of their regular range.)

Throughout their history they’ve been familiar to a diverse group of human civilizations, societies, nations and peoples, from the Aztecs, Inca and Mayans, to the indigenous tribes of North America and the First Nations of Canada, to the inhabitants of modern-day countries like the US, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

Puma
A puma with her cubs. Credit: Nicolas Lagos

But the name confusion doesn’t just stem from the puma’s many monikers bestowed by people of different cultures across space and time. The puma is also one of three cat species that are regularly called panthers. The other two, jaguars (panthera onca) and leopards (panthera pardus), are true “big cats.” That means they’re members of the genus panthera and they can roar but not purr.

Pumas are easily distinguishable from the other two: They have smooth golden fur without adornments, while jaguars and leopards both have blotches called rosettes.

It’s difficult to tell jaguars from leopards, but the biggest giveaway is the fact that jaguars have solid dot-like markings within their rosettes while leopards do not. In addition, leopards have much longer tails than jaguars or pumas, as they need the counterbalance provided by their tails to help them climb trees and balance themselves on tree limbs.

Photo by Lucas Vinu00edcius Pontes on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Photo by Yigithan Bal on Pexels.com
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Photo by Nihongraphy on Pexels.com
Photo by Nick Nu00fau00f1ez on Pexels.com

Jaguars are excellent climbers as well, but they don’t need to be as adept at living off the ground — they are the apex predators in the Americas, while leopards coexist with lions and other large animals like Cape buffalo that present a danger to the big cats even if they’re not predators.

Which brings us to our last point: Our many-named friends, the pumas, may be big and they may look dangerous, but they’re not. There have been 27 humans killed by the elusive cats in more than a century in the U.S., according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, compared to about 3,000 deaths from dog bites over the same period. Between 30 and 50 people are killed by dogs each year.

Most confrontations between humans and pumas happen when the latter are threatened and cannot escape, or when a female is protecting her cubs.

So if you live in an area where you have a chance to see these beautiful cats, admire them and keep your own kitties indoors, but don’t freak out — the puma you see one second will be gone the next.

nature animal wilderness head
A captive puma. Credit: Pexels.com