Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Black Panther exist?

Those are two from Texas, supposedly.

well i've never seen a black panther but i did see a couple monkeys cross the CR near where my parents had their ranch.

Like Okanagon said... Lots of photos out there. Who knows where they were made, or what animal they were made of.

I wanna see a dead one. A rug or DNA ought to do it..

Here's my story. I saw one in 2001.

The strangest animal I've ever seen

There's monkeys all over S. Texas.

Several years ago a lab let monkeys loose.

My brother in law killed a monkey that was trying to get corn out of his feeder in Coleman Texas. It was 1997.

Had one of my hunters come in from hunting a sendero and tell us he saw a little black kid walk out in the sendero and sit down, scratch his ass, then get up and leave.

I told him it was probably one of those lab monkey escapees. He was relieved he had not lost his mind completely.

I watched one at 20 yards while bowhunting when I was 15...mid 1990s. It came into the edge of a small foodplot and layed down next to a tree. It was around 60- 75lbs i would guess and I admit I was freaked out enough I started calling towards my dad who was hunting about 150 yards behind me since he had the only gun. I didn't know what that thing was capable of doing. It hung around about 15 minutes and eased off. I don't really advertise that I've seen one because of the nay sayers. I've just never seen a black house cat that big. But I agree, at some point one must be caught on a trail camera...maybe they have. A good rabbit hunting buddy of mine said his dogs on to one and he watched them chase it across a field so he's a believer too.

Why are all the stories of "black panthers" about small cats? Seems nearly all the stories that get tossed out there are about sub-75 pound cats. Melanistic big cats aren't dwarfs, yet it seems nearly all the stories are about undersized specimens. My theory is the teller doesn't want the story to be too unbelievable so they downsize the animal because that somehow makes the story more believable.

i use to deliver purina monkey chow to the monkey farm outside alice tx. nasty animals.

Sheesh ironbender, a pre-post warning please!

I have seen a black leopard in East Kalimantan (Indo Borneo) on a logging track in the mountains about 10am. Surprised me as didn’t know they were there, commonly black Cloud Leopards to blend into the jungle.

Once you have seen one, you will know it. Not a large or feral domestic cat.

Often reports of them here in Aus too. Maybe too many to ignore.

For sure, the Dyaks I was with didn’t seem surprised to see it, but they were hunters and I had stayed at their home the night before and they had lots of Rusa deer heads on the walls. They called them cat or panther. Blank looks when you mention leopard.

When I was in my late teens or early 20's a monkey escaped from the Ft. Worth Zoo. It made it's way a mile or so to a very affluent neighborhood called: Tanglewood. For months the monkey was spotted on rooftops and in peoples backyards. The fish and game people could not catch it, and calls from news organizations and television stations went unheeded as people set food out for the critter. I recall numerous sightings from personal friends. This lasted a few months and then suddenly the monkey was no more. The sightings and talk of the critter just ceased and media reports went silent.

Curious thing. No one knows what became of it, other than it just disappeared.


DMc

yeah he does.. I saw the movie...

I was in the, "they don't exist" camp for many years, until a melanistic mountain lion sat in my CO driveway one
afternoon, and crossed the road in front of my pickup two days later. He jumped a fence going sharply uphill,
and his belly was so dark it seemed dark orange, but his back and sides could easily be called "black", and that
would be the one description that works best. If you can accept "panther" as cougar, puma or mountain lion,
then, "black" ones do exist.

That's why these threads go on and on and on. And why they are never solved.

Nobody has ever killed a black mountain lion. One has never been documented. One has never been run over or found dead.

Just like bigfoot.

" Melanistic or black cougars are known; cougars of Florida seem to run strongly to that 'freak'
color." - Mammals of North America by Victor H. Cahalane, 1947, reprinted 1961, page 272.

Yes, they've been documented. But the one I saw was only "black" if coffee can be black,
or if people can be black, much like the occasional Eastern Fox Squirrel I see in MO now is black.
This is a somewhat humiliating thing- my wife saw him first, out an upstairs window, with the sun
behind him, and I told her he wasn't black, it was the light. Forward 2 days, 3:00 pm in the summer,
he covered at least a quarter mile while I could see him, crossing the road no more than 30 feet
ahead of me. He was obviously male, as well as obviously "black". If I ever see bigfoot with similar
circumstances, I guess I'll have to believe that, too. I sure hope she doesn't see one first. I'd hate to
have to apologize for that one.

Really? Does Victor H. Cahalane have a picture of one in the book? A skinned and rugged out black Florida cougar? Exactly how did he document this? Since they are "known to run strongly to that freak color" it shouldn't be too hard to find some credible physical evidence to show.

Please post the picture of the one that was sitting in your driveway that afternoon. You do have a picture, right?

Had a cougar on my old deer spot (didn't see it, but was asked not to shoot it).
Escaped from some nearby private zoo.
Bet most sightings of strange critters are escapees.........and............. if the owner had them illegally, they never would report it.

No, sorry, I have no pictures, nor any idea whether that author had any, either. Therefore my evidence is
completely unreliable, and there's absolutely no reason anyone should believe it. Also there are no feral hogs
in MO- which the Dept. of Conservation told me when I called to ask about hunting them, a few months before
they started a public campaign against them- mule deer don't eat sagebrush- which I once heard a wildlife biologist
state- coyotes don't hunt in packs, therefore they do little damage to big game- another biologist said that one.
My eyes work fairly well, though not as well as they used to. I used to be a lot more skeptical, too. It's hard to
believe in what one hasn't seen, for sure. Might be more important sometimes, than others.