Sputter that thing was cool sittin in that big glass window. Remember the big Constrictors they had also?? Ans the Tigers in the back in the BIG arse cage?? I used to love going there just to see the critters (not to mention the food ). Sure was a shame when that place burnt down. Head rumors back when it happened that it was some whack job Animal Rights Activist but who knows............... Sorry for the rant. Just glad someone else remembered that COOL ARSE Black Cat they had.


Rob

Black bears have been recently seen in east texas.

http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/newsmedia/releases/?req=20080415c
One of my customers saw one just outside Rusk. I ask him
if he could have mistaken a hog for a bear. He said do
hogs stand on two legs ?
just thought I would add some fuel to this fire.

MO

Should have ground checked him...probably a feral cat..

african black p

The same things keep getting repeated over and over and over.

Black Panthers and Spiderman=Fiction

+2 Again, I know what I heard and they are alive and well. My grandfather showed me pictures taken of them by my great-grandfather in the early 50's. If you live in the Kickapoo-Neches basin you know what I'm talking about. There is no way that they were are kiiled in the 1800's. Plus has anyone heard the story back in the day about the circus train that derailed near Murchison,TX off of Hwy 31 in which several of the BIG CATS escaped.

The circus part adds a little flavor to this thread.

As I read this thread, I am going to after all these pages , try to answer the original Question, or help. I work with Domestic House cats everyday. They , when Fereel , can get up to and even larger than the one you have photographed here. The cat you saw , most likely is lean from a free range meat diet , high in protien and low in fat, something we domesticated people , buy in large quantities to feed our housecats. I take care of a cat where I work that is well over fourty pounds and he is a regular old kitty , rolls over like a dog , has a little bitty head in comparison to his large body, but not a fat kitty, I have seen his x-rays and he is just a big kitty of the tabby variety. The pictures you got are very cool to look at. Texas A&M is currently conductiong a study on how to best control colonies of these animals in city settings, but the ones in your picture will still always be around and very nice looking and bigger cats too boot. Now to debuff all thi sblack panther stuff, well I don't work on kitties that big, but I do live within a stones throw of the Damn on Lake Waco, and I have for fifteen years. There were three mountain lions, panthers whatever you want to call them, at some point that lived in the woods between the Damn and my house , and one of them is black, My husband and I have both seen it ,as well as the other two , they live running up and down the river and I suspect always have at some point, while traveling as they do. All that said , I think you have some very nice pics there and hope this helps somehow...

That is definately a house cat, if it was a wild cat, it's tail would be about as long as it's body!!!

Wild house cat. We use to shoot them on my grandpas ranch growing up because they were everywhere.

Consider the picture with the cat laying in the road.


Look first at the green grass. Notice how you can see the grass standing out against the road? That is because the road is slightly titled towards the lake. From travel the tire tracks in the road will also be slightly lower than the ground on either side of the road. Thus, there is going to be a masking of part of the lane nearest the camera. This will make any object laying beyond the imaginary line between the tops of the grass and a line drawn from the camera crossing the top of the grass and ending in the road appear to cover more of the road than it really does. As you can see in the picture of the cat laying in the road, the grass partially masks the front paws of the cat, and a portion of the tire track. The cat is laying in the middle of the first tire track, and does not completely cross the portion of the road between tire tracks. Since we know that this road is 8' wide from edge of tire track to opposite edge, we can also assume that this cat laying prone is taking up less than half of this 8' distance since its head is resting in track one, and the entire body reaches only to what would be the middle of the road. This gives you a length less than 4'. I guess anywhere between 44" and 36".



Also, I am not sure, but do any of the big cats have green eyes? I noticed that like the cat sitting beside a swimming pool that someone else linked to this cat has green eyes. Notice that the way the cat lays by the pool its head from ear tip to ear tip appears to be as wide as one of the tiles. I think if you put that cat beside the pool into the pictures of the one by the pond you would have a near exact or exact match.

For the jaguarundi question, do a yahoo or google search on them and look at some pictures of them. They are not solid black like this animal, have a long tail, and a less blocky head. Since it is genetically impossible for a Mountain Lion to have black fur, the only other possible explanation is a black jaguar, which do occur in nature. Thoughts?

Not sure about the cat but this thread is the most interesting I've read in quite a while.

That's a hog-tator!