July 23, 2008

Rt. 66’s Kitty Cat, Not Panther

If you ever
Plan to motor west
Travel my way, take the highway that’s the best
Get your kicks on Route 66

It winds from Chicago to LA
More than two thousand miles all the way
Baby, get your kicks on Route 66

Now you go through St. Louie
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty
You’ll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff Arizona
Don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66

Now you go through St. Louie
Joplin, Missouri
And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty
Now you’ll see Amarillo
Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff Arizona
Don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66

Get your kicks on Route six six
Get your kicks on Route 66
Get your kicks on Route six six

Route 66, by Bobby Troup, 1946.

Following up on the earlier story of a “black panther” being caught on video near Joplin, Missouri, it is always good to hear results of an investigative inquiry to test height and more.

The above video taken on Saturday, July 5, at a company on old Route 66, east of Galena, Kansas, is of a domestic cat, says Matt Peek, fur-bearer biologist with the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.

The department did what they should have to determine how big the cat was. Peek and two others from the department traveled to Galena, last Thursday, July 17th, with a digital camera and a 15-inch-tall by 64-inch-long piece of cardboard to conduct their own experiment. The cardboard was placed in the spot where the cat is seen on the surveillance video and was photographed.

“The length was meant to represent an approximate length of a small adult or subadult mountain lion, but the lion would be 1.5 or two times as tall as the cardboard,” Peek wrote in his report. “The animal in the surveillance footage is nowhere near that.”

He wrote that based on comparisons of the surveillance footage and the experiment photos, the animal in the video is just over 20 inches long, consistent with a house cat.

Peek wrote that mountain lions have proportionally smaller heads than house cats, and mountain lions have proportionally longer tails than house cats.

And the large paw prints found at the scene? Peek wrote that he viewed photos of the prints and saw others while in Galena, and he identified them as dog tracks.

Reached by phone, Peek said he would have been surprised to find a cougar or mountain lion in the Galena area, because it is not part of their habitat. He said though almost every community has a legend about a black panther or cougar, it’s always someone else who had seen it.

He said the only feline found in the wild around the region is the bobcat.

Peek said he doesn’t expect his findings to settle the debate for everyone.

“I know there will be people who question anything the state does,” he said. “I think the results are pretty conclusive.”

Galena police Chief Larry Delmont said he is satisfied with the report. He said he would have been concerned about public safety if officials had determined that the animal was a cougar or other big cat.

Source: “Galena’s wild cat chase over,” by Roger McKinney, The Joplin Globe, July 22, 2008.

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Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

Filed under Alien Big Cats, Breaking News, Cryptotourism, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoologists, Cryptozoology, Evidence, Footprint Evidence, Forensic Science, Media Appearances, Mystery Cats