Tall tails: why does the myth of exotic big cats prowling the Australian bush persist?
Scott Lansbury had his first encounter 25 years ago. It was in the Victorian town of Upper Beaconsfield, close to midnight, where he and his brother saw the animal walking up the footpath across the road from where they lived.
“It was bigger than any dog I’ve ever seen,” he recalls. “Bigger than a labrador, bigger than a [German] shepherd.”
Lansbury is convinced the mystery animal, which he says was black and walked with a feline prowl, was a big cat. He says he has seen similar animals several times in the intervening years.
“I kept hearing other stories,” Lansbury says. So a decade ago, he started a Facebook group, Black panther sightings in Victoria, “sort of as a joke”. Since then, the group has grown to 36,000 people.
Members post a mixture of blurry images and footage, videos of big cats clearly taken in other countries, and avowed testimonies of personal encounters.
“I look at every video that’s been posted on the group,” Lansbury says.
Sightings of mysterious cats in the wild – and accompanying reports of strange livestock deaths – are not a new phenomenon. Large felids have been rumoured to prowl the Australian bush for nearly 200 years, says David Waldron, a folklorist and historian at Federation University.
The earliest reported phantom cat sighting Waldron has identified was near Adelaide, in 1836. A sailor said he had found “a cat-like animal with orange fur, black stripes down its back and white tufted ears, hunting for marsupial rats near a body of water”.
In the 1890s, panic erupted in the South Australian town of Tantanoola, when stories emerged of a predator stalking properties, terrifying farming dogs and slaughtering sheep.
The exotic animal trade was widespread in the late 19th century, Waldron says. Classified ads of the day offered leopard and panther cubs for sale.
The Tantanoola tiger, as it became known, was eventually caught. The beast turned out not to be a felid, but a Eurasian wolf. Equally misplaced in the Australian bush, the wolf was hypothesised to have been a boat stowaway that survived a shipwreck off the coast. It was stuffed and remains on display at the Tantanoola hotel.
In the last century, rumours of wild big cats have also been fuelled by stories of escaped circus animals such as lions and tigers, and American soldiers bringing exotic pets into the country as military mascots.
In Victoria, sightings have been reported in Gippsland and the Grampians national park, while in New South Wales there have been hundreds of reported sightings of big cats in the Blue Mountains – known as the Blue Mountains panther or the Lithgow lion.
Last year, a video of a black cat was captured on Sydney’s upper north shore by a university student, who described it as longer than 1m, “with a body on ‘roids”.
To the untrained eye, accurately estimating the size of an animal after a fleeting sighting is a difficult task, says Peter Menkhorst, an ecologist at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research in Melbourne.
Feral domestic cats – Felis catus – can occasionally reach impressive sizes, and have been behind at least some reported big cat sightings.
“If you see a [feral] domestic cat that maybe weighs something like 10kg, which is about twice what most pet cats
weigh … your initial impression might be: gee, that’s a big animal,” Menkhorst says.
In 2005, a deer hunter, Kurt Engel, shot dead what he believed to be a black panther near Sale, in east Gippsland. He estimated the cat was about 1.5m long. Engel kept the animal’s tail as a trophy, which was 60cm long – roughly twice the length of a regular domestic cat’s tail. However, DNA testing later revealed the animal was actually Felis catus, a large feral cat. Inadequate evidence
In 2012, a report commissioned by the Victorian government concluded that the available evidence was “inadequate to establish that a wild population of ‘big cats’ exists in Victoria”.
Menkhorst, who co-authored the report, says the chances of there being unknown big cats out in the Victorian wilderness is “minuscule”.
“No one has ever actually brought in a carcass or even a part of one of these mythical beasts.”
Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning
One piece of unexplained evidence was a scat found in Winchelsea in 1991. Barbara Triggs, an expert in animal scats, identified the faecal sample as most likely belonging to a leopard, and isolated several hairs from the scat that she believed the animal may have inadvertently ingested while grooming itself.
Mitochondrial DNA in the hairs was tested in 2000, and the sequence was confirmed as belonging to a leopard, though the scientist who tested them said he could not rule out contamination.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty around the origin of that scat,” Menkhorst says. “It’s very inconclusive.”
Menkhorst’s scepticism is also grounded in years of wildlife monitoring. “We’ve done literally hundreds of thousands of what we call trap nights,” he says, where camera traps that detect heat and motion are set out in the bush to monitor continuously for weeks at a time.
“We’ve taken millions of photos, literally, and we’ve got nothing we can’t explain, everything from … dunnarts up to dingoes. Lots of feral cats, no other species of cat,” he says. “Given the intensity of fauna surveying we’ve done in Victoria in the last 50 years, it’s an almost inconceivable thing that we would not have found [a big cat] if it did exist.”
‘It re-enchants the bush’
Waldron agrees. “I am sceptical in that there’s simply insufficient evidence as yet,” he says. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea, you’ve just got to find positive evidence.”
Despite the lack of evidence, big cats in the wild have continued to hold a certain appeal.
“It re-enchants the bush, it makes it mysterious, magical,” Waldron says. He has joined big cat hunters out on tracking jaunts at night, listening for animal sounds using directional microphones. “It’s quite an exciting and evocative thing to do.”
Unexplained livestock deaths may have a simple rather than eerie explanation, Waldron says. “At the heart of these panics is usually stock kills that look different to how they’re done normally by wild dogs. When people have gotten into it forensically – as in the animal mutilation panics in US – what they find causes it is multiple predation on the same carcass by different predators.”
A Twitch streamer by the name of Rainey Jay, who lives on the midnorth coast of NSW, has been fascinated for years by big cat stories and online groups dedicated to them.
Though she is sceptical about their existence, she says there is something “romantic about the whole notion that maybe there are still some big mysteries out there for people to solve”.
“You’ve got people that look for Bigfoot or aliens, but for giant cats living out in the wild, that does have something plausible about it.”
The enchantment with the idea of big cats in the Australian wild “overshadows the problem that we have with feral cats”, Jay says. Feral domestic cats, which cover all but an estimated 0.2% of Australia, are both ecologically and economically damaging. It has been estimated that they kill 1m birds a day.
“That’s something I think we should look at more,” she says.
Lansbury has no doubt he wasn’t mistaken that night 25 years ago, and wants others to keep an open mind. “You can definitely see why people don’t believe in them,” he says. “You’ve got to see it to believe it.”