Kitty of Cougar ????

Probably cat....

Tell your friend to get a new trail cam that takes better quality pictures!!

Good grief, why is it that with any "odd" sighting - bigfoot, ghost, ufo, etc., the pictures are always so grainy?

50 years ago - the Kennedy Zapruder film shows more clearer shots than this one! I thought technology was getting better?

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Michael W. Smith in North-West Pennsylvania

"Everything happens for a reason."

Where does it say that is grass and not weeds?

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True. It's probably actually a chupacabra. I think maybe these creatures emit cryptozoological rays that make the picture grainy.

There are lynx in PA and NY state but they're not black, more a "blond Paris tweed" coloring. Bigger than a house cat, but not panther sized.

Lynx have really short tails, bobcats are pretty common here but they don't have tails at all.

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It appears to have a more powerful rear end than a cat. That is really bad picture--it's hard to tell, but the general shape is cougar, not kitty. I can't see how long the tail is.

's in PA.. they don't have cougars in PA supposedly.. If they did, it would be an Eastern Cougar, and those aren't black...

Well, the litter in the PBS documentary about Florida Panthers showed a litter of cubs that had 2 almost chocolate cubs. If they are any thing like deer.....the ones that stay in the deep swamps are darker than the ones that hang around the fields. The bugger I stopped in the highway and watched cross the highway was almost black...down here in Eastern NC. That's where the gamewarden say that there ain't none, but if you shoot one it's a $10,000 fine...
Get real folks....the same folk that tell us there are not any mountain lions, or panther cats...old folks here call them that....tell us there is no real inflation, the Dollar is solid...and Ocare is a sure cure for healthcare

LOL, we don't have any in Mississippi either but, evidently the one that jumped across the road in front of my car a few years back must not have gotten the memo. I was driving a Grand Am, going slow on a back, country road to my best friend's house. He jumped from the side of the road (that is where I first spotted him so I stopped the car in the middle of the road), landed in front of my car and jumped again and was off the road but, I got a good look at him. His head was even with the hood of my car and his tail was as long as the rest of his body. Dark tan color. NOT a bobcat as the game wardens around here will try to tell you. I have seen many bobcats in my life and this was way bigger and had a tail. Old timers around here, including my grandma before she died will also tell you that we have black panthers as well. I believe them.

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Lousy picture but I'd say cat, not cougar. I've seen plenty of black housecats slinking around that look just like that.

No real need to be insulting about it either way. No one here has proof it's one or the other.

The pic's just not clear enough to tell if it's a lion or a housecat. Not enough resolution. The front quarters make me think mountain lion, but there are domestic cats built like that -- I own one who's got some siamese in his family tree.

As far as jaguars go, they are HUGE and if you ever see one in the wild, they are unmistakable. Particularly if you've seen enough mountain lions to be familiar with what lions look like. I've seen one jaguar crossing a road in south-central Arizona (just north of I-8) and it was easily twice the size of a mountain lion. It was a truly enormous cat and I consider it one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences, seeing it.

OTOH, it's also easy to overestimate the size of an animal. I had a neighbor tell me all about a "huge" black cat he watched kill a rabbit in my front yard. He claimed it was at least thirty pounds and warned me to be careful because he thought it was an escaped exotic! I'd watched the same kill. The huge cat was my own siamese mix black cat, who weighs around ten pounds, and the bunny was just a very young desert cottontail. (Good kitty, protecting my garden. He was murder on gophers, too.)

Also know someone who shot an elk in an antlerless hunt here. (We don't have bull/cow hunts, we have with/without antler hunts.) He thought he'd shot a decent sized cow until he went to retrieve it. It was a 200 pound bull elk calf. Legal to kill, because there were no antlers yet, but not what he was after. (I saw the photos -- without something next to it for scale, it would have been easy to mistake for a cow. Particularly since shot it at 400 yards, which is a fairly typical distance around here.)

Anyway, my point is that judging size without something for scale is really difficult.

Um, regarding tails- Florida panthers frequently have stubby tails as a result of inbreeding.
Wish my computer would've brought up the original picture, would've loved to see it.

No cougars in PA? Huh, got to tell my friend that the one he got last year in the town of Panther was a hoax...

Matt

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Well the picture really isn't clear enough to make a good decision on it. But as for the grass grows, that don't mean nothing. Around here we have Johnson Grass and boy does it get high with wide blades. It would make just about anything look small, especially in a unclear picture such as what the OP posted.

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r.h. in oklahoma

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Pictures please. In fact, I would love to see a documented case anywhere in the Northeastern U.S.. Newspaper articles, State Police reports...anything other than my neighbor's brother's friend shot one, or saw one, or hit one...or internet photos of ones shot in Colorado. I've been hearing these stories for 30 years, but they always lack a carcass, photo or news coverage...and a cougar in PA, or NY or CT, etc. would be very, very newsworthy. There hasn't been a documented wild eastern mountain lion in the northeast since the 1870's.

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Hmmm, I don't carry a camera, but if I did, I could show you the paw prints on the hood of the Chevelle I was restoring and the big cat about 30 yards out along the stone wall, next to the 1940;s Studebaker pickup for reference.
As to your request for pictures, I don't need them...guess you do? Sorry to disappoint.
Guess rattlers, coyotes, large bears and bobcats aren't here either...My old mind must be slipping...

Matt

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My DIL saw a cougar walk through their yard when they lived in PA, just south of the NY line west of Binginghamton. They had a farm and she grew up in rural NE WA state, where cougars are relatively common. She said it was a cougar, it was not in a hurry so she got a good look, and I believe her.

I have little trouble believing that lions might be in every state in the union and yet not often seen. They're well camouflaged, they're smart, and they're primarily nocturnal. They spend a lot of time staying very still, too.

I've seen quite a few, but I've also spent a lot of time outside in remote areas, I've got a good eye for spotting wildlife, and I live in Arizona, where there's a very high population density and (in the desert areas) not a huge amount of cover.

When I lived south of Phoenix out in the desert flats, we had lions around. For every lion I saw, I saw lion tracks or kills or smelled lion pee (which smells like housecat pee on steroids -- they pee where they sleep, and lie in it) probably a hundred times. This was out in creosote flats, with the occasional palo verde or shallow wash for cover. They are just flat out hard to see.

In some of the dense vegetation you guys have in wetter climates? They'd be almost impossible to see.

In order to know if lions are around, you need to watch for the following:

-- Tracks, which are huge. Bobcat tracks can be big enough to mistake for lion tracks. Lion tracks are absolutely enormous.
-- Kills -- when they kill something, they typically drag it into dense brush under a tree and then scrape vegetation over it.
-- The odor of lion pee, which, like I said, smells like musky housecat pee. They will spray fence-posts and trees (and if the spray marks are at thigh height you know it wasn't your neighbor's housecat) and they pee where they sleep, and roll in it. I've heard people claim the main reason that mountain lions don't make good pets is their habit of peeing in their bedding and anywhere they sleep (your couch, your bed, the rug, etc.) -- they apparently tame down fairly well. Not that I'd try it.

Most of the lions I've seen have been running from me. Sometimes they will wait until you pass and THEN bolt, so keep your ears open for cracking twigs and the like. The only time I spotted one when it wasn't running was when it thought it was well-hidden halfway up a cliff about a hundred feet from me. It twitched its tail, and I saw it then. (You live in Arizona and spend any time in the back country, anything that remotely resembles a snake will make you jump, My first thought was, "Snake!" and then I realized what I was seeing, waved my warms, and yelled, and the lion bolted. I think he didn't run before then because it was pouring rain and he'd found a dry shelf on the cliff face to wedge himself in.)

I'm in SC. I saw one run across the road at twilight several miles from my home. Saw it in my headlights briefly. It was about the size of a large German Shephard. I realized that it was running like a cat, but too big for a cat and it had a long tail, so it was not a bobcat. Mentioned it to a friend who lived near there and he said he had been hearing something that sounded like one. Neighbors about two miles from me report hearing one and seeing huge tracks that an adult man's had can fit in. Supposedly some of them have game camera pictures, but i haven't seen them. Recently a picture was posted on the YTMag site of one taken 50 or so miles west of me in Oconee county.

When the neighbors talked to the game warden they were told that there were no cougars in SC, but there was a $12k fine for killing one. Pretty rich for an animal that doesn't exist.

COWS

Oh, yes. Rattlers, coyotes, bears and bobcats are certainly here. I see them regularly on my trailcams, see them as roadkill, are documented in news footage, newspaper stories with pictures, and are recognized by conservation officers and wildlife biologists. Mountain lions, on the other hand, have not been documented by any of these means. I don't wish it to be so. I think a breeding population of EMLs would be pretty neat.

I had this same argument about a decade ago with some hunting acquaintances. I was on the other side of the argument, however. As a biologist I understood the stealthy, solitary nature of mountain lions. With all the stories of sightings that I had heard, surely at least a small population of wild EMLs existed. I myself thought I saw, as I rode down the road, what looked like a puma roadkill near Garland, PA in 1986. After a prolonged argument with this guy, I asked how he could be so sure that there were no puma in PA...He responded, "Give me one single shred of documented evidence that there ARE EML in PA". So I dug and researched and talked to wildlife biologists, read scientific papers on the EML, searched news databases and microfiches looking for evidence to prove this pompous doofus wrong. Guess what? there isn't any documented evidence.

I'm not debating that people believe they have seen EMLs in PA, and I'm not calling anyone a liar. I'm simply saying, in this age of smartphones, 24/7 news cycles, a media that likes to sensationalize every odd news story, easily accessible archived news stories, personal video cameras, instant messaging, SMS messaging, MMS messaging, hundreds of thousands of trail cams, home surveillance systems, facebook, etc., etc., etc., that there would be some physical evidence that they inhabited this part of the country. Certainly the climate here is favorable to them, there is a smorgasbord of prey for them here...would be easy pickings. There are lots of remote forests and mountains for them to roam. If they were here wouldn't they flourish under these conditions? Wouldn't there be YouTube videos showing dog vs. lion, lion vs deer, lion vs. bear, like you see all the time out west?

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'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

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