Cat-like animal sighting in Granville disputed
BRIAN MILLER • Advocate Reporter • July 22, 2010
GRANVILLE — The latest unusual animal sighting in Granville was even more inconclusive than the last.
The resident of the east side of the village who saw it said she thinks it was in the cat family. A state wildlife expert said it is more likely to be in the dog family.
Rose Wingert, of Victoria Drive, reported seeing the animal in front of her home the morning of July 13. The animal ran away quickly, but Wingert said she was able to get a good look at it.
She said her first impression had been that it might be a coyote. But after checking photos of coyotes on the Internet, she decided the animal she saw wasn’t one.
“At first, I didn’t think too much of it, but then I started wondering, ‘What was it?'” she said. “It was a lean and long animal,” she added in an e-mail. “It was not a mountain lion, but a rare type of cat.”
Contacted about identifying the animal, Andrew J. Montoney, state director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services in Reynoldsburg, said based on the description from Wingert, the animal is more likely to be in the dog family than the cat family.
Montoney said there are no native “cat” species matching this description in Ohio. However, he said the description — a body about 3 feet long, a long tail and short fur of mottled (browns, blacks and grays) color — could match any of three common “dog-like” species native to Ohio: the coyote, red fox and gray fox.
It also could have been a non-native, exotic animal, Montoney said.
“There are periodic reports of people seeing non-native (exotic) animals all throughout Ohio,” he wrote in an e-mail. “When verified, these exotic animals usually turn out to be someone’s pet that escaped or was intentionally turned loose due to difficulty of raising a wild animal. But these verified incidents are rare and uncommon.”
Granville police received a report on the sighting the evening of July 13 but did not send out an officer. Granville Police Chief Jim Mason, who wasn’t on duty at the time, said an officer mostly likely would have been sent if the report were timely.
In April 2008, another east-side resident, Char Donelan, reported seeing an unusual animal in her backyard on Longford Drive. The animal she described resembled the one Wingert reported. After viewing a video a neighbor took of the animal, Donelan said she thought it to be a coyote.
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.
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