For reference, The "maintain lion in goshen" was a chain email/facebook thing. It was a pic from Canada.

I laughed!

Lol!

Way more effort went into that than should have.

😂

Can’t you clearly see that’s a bobcat?

100% a golden retriever.

🤣

I truly love this inside joke. Please keep it up forever.

r/beatmetoit

I live in Granby. We have some Northern rednecks up here that will swear to you on a stack of Bibles that they have seen not only mountain lion but 'Black Panthers'.

If you know anything about genetics you know that a 'black panther' in CT is a genetic impossibility unless it's escaped from a zoo. If it were city people I would think they'd mistook a bear for a big cat. But it's the long time natives that have lived here for generations that insist they've seen something that can't possibly exist.

Everybody and their brother up here has got ring doorbell cameras, game cams and dash cams. If there ever is a mountain lion, which is remotely possible. Get it on video or it didn't happen

A panther is any large cat that’s melanistic. There’s no reason it couldn’t occur in a mountain lion.

Do you realize how elusive larger cats are?

Not for nothing, but maybe they have? I mean a black mountain lion would be pretty surprising. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods in New England, I have seen one mountain lion, 23 years ago, in southern Vermont. We were driving home from the first fast and furious movie in the theaters lol. But yeah, people are constantly mistaking foxes here for almost anything they could imagine.

It's not possible. There's a gene that causes melanism in animals of a species. Those who have been known to have melanism occur in their species have the gene - all of them do. So the gene can be found in all gray squirrels, all bobcat, all wolves, all coyote, and all leopards and jaguars. But the gene does not occur in mountain lions.

And all of those species are animals where we have proof. Either a living captive or have seen black versions in the wild.

Leopards and jaguars are the cat that we refer to as a black panther when it has a melanistic version. Leopards don't exist in this part of the world at all. And jaguars have only rarely been seen coming into the very southern part of the United States. Jaguars are extremely elusive. They have the whole elusive ghost cat thing down pat in South and Central America. So it's not just a mountain lion thing. The only way they sight jaguars in the United States is with game cameras.

There has never been a real proved sighting of black mountain lion. No photos, no video, none shot by hunters, no pelts, no taxidermy. Not in the entire history of the United States.
There have been pictures, photos and sightings of large black domestic cats. There's a photo claimed to be a black mountain lion in Texas climbing on a stack of cinder block. Cindy block are 18 in across 9 in in height. This animal is clearly not very big. There have been a couple that were faked. There's a doctored photo you can find online. And there's a taxidermist who dyed a pelt.

It's probably a bobcat or a coyote. Both of which are common in New England and can be melanistic. Although there's never been a truly black bobcat, they do occur to be quite dark. But both bobcat and coyote have the gene for that mountain lions do not.

There is a YouTube video which may have been taken down. This woman gets her gun because she swears there's a mountain lion in her yard in Colorado I think. She swears up and down it's a mountain lion and she's going to go out and either shoot it or scare it off. As she approaches this cat sitting in her yard it gets scared enough to get up and take off and at that point you can see it's a bobcat. Slightly tufted ears, and a bobtail, and clearly very small compared to a mountain lion. She turned off comments

Yeah there's a mountain lion picture that keeps circulating in our area of Connecticut. Everyone claims that a friend of a friend or their cousin took this picture. The problem is the picture is a reused one from Canada. It might be the same photograph. Clearly shows a mountain lion and someone's backyard. It just keeps getting cropped a little different 😂

Actually is a reason. No gene for melanism in the species.

Omg😱

Yeah bobcats have a vastly different appearance than mountain lions. People get excited when they see movement of something larger than normal and tend to have trouble interpreting what they see. I feel like the black panther /mountain lion thing is some Granby folklore. I’m not familiar with the video from Colorado you are talking about, anybody that’s so freaked out by an animal in their yard in Colorado is probably not going to be able to reliably identify it. When I used Nextdoor in our neighborhood their would regularly be phots of a mangy fox that people were freaked by, it happened to be the same one that built a den under my barn… It’s interesting here, I live close by to Granby in North Canton. I have had the opportunity to observe more animals here than anywhere I have lived. Had a family of foxes last summer and the local bobcat appears to be pregnant, but those guys will be impossible to see.

This is crazy because I swear to god I saw two cougars at the bar at Max Downtown last night.

Haters will say it’s fake

Picture taken by astronaut in full gear

I've spent the past 2 hours looking for that bobcat video. 😂. Maybe she got tired of the embarrassment and finally took it down.

If you're in North Canton you're not far away. Keep your eyes open every once in a while the moose goes through and I would think your neck of the woods would be remote enough. My son actually has a picture of the moose in a pond which is less than a mile from our house. The last moose that spent any time in Granby unfortunately also had brainworm and eventually deteriorated and d e e p came and put it down. ☹️.

“Well the buzz from the bees is that the leopards are in a bit of a spot. And the baboons are going ape over this. Of course, the giraffes are acting like they’re above it all. The tick birds are pecking on the elephants. I told the elephants to forget it, but they can’t. The cheetahs are hard up, but I always say, cheetahs never prosper…” Zazu from the Lion King

The thing is outside of unconfirmed sightings there is no evidence. People would be find scat, carcasses, foot prints. Even a guy that works with DEP mistook a bobcat for a mountain lion. They found tracks but it was bobcat tracks.

HEY WAIT A MINUTE I DON'T THINK THIS IS A REAL PICTURE GUYS