dispatches from the edge

Proudlly showcasing the weird, bizarre, and the downright creepy since 2005

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Australian Big Cats or Alien Cats down under

dear readers

I hope everyone had a wonderful christmas and is having a happy new year. sorry about not updating in a while. i had some personal things to deal with. today i will talked about Alien cats in Australia.

what are alien cats?

longtime readers will know that I started this blog with a discussion of alien cats in England. An alien cat is a cat that is not in its natural habitat. two cases of this have been reported in Australia. the Gippsland phantom cat and the blues mountain panther.

the Gippsland phantom cat

the region of Gippsland in Australia has been plagued with sightings of a large non native cat since after World War II. if fact some believe that the origin of the Gippsland Phantom Cat, if it did indeed exist, may be traced back to animals let loose by United States soldiers based in Victoria, Australia during World War II. A pair of pumas (or other large cats) were used as mascots. Upon the end of the war, it is speculated that the pumas were released into the wild, somewhere in the Gippsland region (although some claim the cats were released in the Grampians National Park) where they subsequently bred

A variations of this myth is the claim that large cats were the descendants of animals which escaped from a travelling zoo or a circus (common at the turn of the century), or were kept as pets by gold miners during the 1850s gold rush. (a small note there are no big cats native to Australia) in fact A leaked government document cited 59 reported sightings between 1998 and 2001! what is going on? did a group of cats escape or were let loose and breed to form a stable population or is a myth. add fuel to the fire. In June 2005, Kurt Engel, a deer hunter from Noble Park, shot what he claimed was a large cat, in rugged terrain near the town of Sale. Engel photographed the dead cat, before cutting off its tail, and dumping the body in a river. DNA testing results determined that the beast was a giant feral cat/ this led to speculation that the Gippsland cat is a mutant feral cat and this raises many question as why did this happened and is it widespread...

the Blues Mountain panther

the blues mountain panther is one of the oldest sighted cat in Australia. sightings have been reported since 1850! It has has been reported by residents of the Blue Mountains area, west of Sydney, New South Wales for over a century. It has also been dubbed by many as the Penrith Panther, due to the sightings occurring in the areas of the Blue Mountains, Richmond and Penrith Valley areas, who's first grade NRL team is the Penrith Panthers. t is frequently speculated that the creature (or more probably, creatures), if it exists, may be the offspring of animals that escaped into the wilderness from travelling circuses in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Another suggestion is that because the creature has been reported largely in old gold-mining regions, its ancestors may have been imported from the United States by American miners in the 1850s and later released. There are also supposed eyewitness reports of US military personnel releasing big cats imported in aircraft from southeast Asia during the Second World War.

Another theory of the cat's origins lay in the now closed safari park at Warragamba. Sightings have been reported in this area in recent years, with many believing that a panther or panthers may have escaped from the wildlife park before it was closed down, or during the removal of animals, however this cannot be confirmed by residents or park owners.

Proof of the panther's existence is largely limited to eyewitness encounters, combined with such circumstantial evidence as large feline-type scratches found high on trees, and the carcasses of sheep and cattle supposedly killed by it. In the latter case the remains have allegedly been found high in the fork of trees, well above the level of flood waters, or in areas not affected by flooding at all, suggesting that they were dragged there by a large, powerful predator. n recent years reports of the Blue Mountains panthers have become increasingly frequent, particularly around the towns of Lithgow and Grose Vale. On several occasions, witnesses have reported being attacked by large dark-coloured feline creatures that are described as being much larger than any known feral cat.

While no conclusive evidence of the "panther" has yet been found, a 2004 report by New South Wales Department of Agriculture investigator Bill Atkinson, the department's rural NSW-based Agricultural Protection Officer, concluded: "Nothing found in this review conclusively proves the presence of free-ranging exotic large cats in New South Wales, but this cannot be discounted and seems more likely than not on the available evidence."

Findings

what is going on? is there a population of alien cats in Australia or is just mass hysteria. we may never know, the answer will remain a mystery...

Love And Peace

Alex Kroot and Tau stand as one Stallwitz


sources

http://en.wikipedia.org for both articles on the Blue Mountain panther and the Gippsland phantom cat