Russell Dahl claims to have seen the big cat and said, “It was about half grown, had a tail about 4 feet long and it was solid black.”
Dahl claims a female neighbor encountered the creature while out on for a run.
“It liked to scared her to death,” he said.
Dahl, himself, did not believe the stories of a black panther in the vicinity initially, not even after his own son spotted the animal; however, he quickly changed his mind once he got a look at the big cat for himself the very next day.
“I said, ‘You saw a coyote.’ Well, the next day I saw it and it wasn’t no coyote,” he said.
Oklahoma State Department of Wildlife officials are very skeptical of sightings of this large black cat and seem to be attributing it to a sort of mass hysteria following the capture of a cougar in Tulsa last week. A cougar that, predictably enough, is being called an escaped pet.
“Sometimes I think they might be seeing a bobcat, maybe even coyotes, once in a while dogs,” Game Warden Ron Comer said. “You can’t always believe what your eyes are telling you.”
Game Warden Comer went on to add, “I never try to tell anybody that they didn’t see what they thought they saw but the melanistic gene does not exist in the mountain lion or the pumas or panthers or whatever you want to call the North American big cat.”
So, once again the people who live and work in a rural area and know the land and the creatures that roam it best are being told they are mistaken. The quote from Game Warden Comer saying that, “You can’t always believe what your eyes are telling you,” has to be terribly insulting to those who claim to have seen this animal. Again, instead of investigating and possibly spending time in the area where the sightings are being reported, officials are just blowing the whole thing off as nonsense and treating those who say they’ve seen this large black cat as simpletons or bumpkins. The fact that residents have been reporting sightings of large black cats for decades in and around Pocasset means little, I suppose.
Frustrating…
Until one walks up and bites a game warden right on his arse.....
ReplyDeleteJustin
My grandfather saw a black panther very recently outside his front yard he lives next to a lake in sapulpa oklahoma he told us on the 2nd of july, 2011 the he saw it just a few days before. He said it was very big, I mean VERY big. Our kids play there and we fish very scary!
ReplyDeleteOf course I saw real panther from my own eyes near Ames, oklahoma... kewlio
ReplyDeletei saw a black panther myself right outside of Duncan Oklahoma about 7 months ago
ReplyDeleteI have heard them I live in comanche everybody thinks in crazy but I have heard them and some are saying there is one running around rhere
DeleteIs there any info on that old photo? the cat really looks more like a young Jaguar and the guy looks more like he's from South America or maybe Latin America. I think ocelots also carry the melanistic gene. I don't believe that is a cougar though.
ReplyDeleteThere has never been a documented case of a black cougar, ever. The gene for that dosn't exhist in these cats. There are blsck jaguars and they used to be in the southern US and recently were sited in Az. Also, there were alot of large cats kept as pets in Oklahoma in the past. I have seen some in some very week cages in the Calumet area. Leopards are commenly black and could some of them have escaped. I wouldn't be surprised. Unfortunately black cougars/mountain lions do not exhist no matter what you want to believel.
ReplyDeleteThen, we saw the same black adolescent "jaguar" twice in our back yard, 1.5 miles south of Liberty Oklahoma in the last 5 weeks. It was walking slowly in the tall grass, was ~ 75 pounds, and had a 3+ foot long tail. My dogs were barking at it from their fenced in enclosure and it was completely unconcerned. I started asking friends and neighbors about
ReplyDelete"black panthers" and to a man and a woman, they have no doubt of their existence. One neighbor reported to me that something [she assumed it was a mountain lion] attacked her 250 pound mastiff some years ago, almost killing him. He had to have a drain in his neck for more than 4 months.
me and some friend just recently saw one a few weeks ago headed back from great lakes, IL we where just coming into the outskirts of Muskogee when my friend Sheena hits the breaks and yells (what the hell was that) I already new what it was because I have had over 7 sighting of these large blacks cats, in Altus, ok and in spring dale, Arkansas! no one can tell me they don't exist!
ReplyDeleteI live in Noble, OK — around 5 miles south of Lake Thunderbird. I have not seen the black panther myself, but know MANY people who have.. especially crossing the road at a specific location — Maguire Rd. & 144th. Many people believe it’s den is down there.
ReplyDeleteven within the past few months he or she has been spotted.
Just a couple of weeks ago, my father-in-law went to discard a deer carcass at the “dump” (basically a dried up river bed that is the entrance to the woods — this is where my fiancé and his dad would gut deer, etc.). He got there and before he was able to throw the carcass in the river bed, he heard cracking noises. To his surprise... he looked down into the bed and there he or she was, cracking away on an older rib cage. As soon as he spotted the mountain lion (not black cat, just normal tan), it spotted him. Started growling, hissing... he told us that he may be 66-years old, but he could have beat ANYONE in the world at the 50 yard dash that night.