East Texas Mountain Lion or Black Panther Sightings/ Killings

[JSAPP]

It just never ends. Coming from grown folk at that. Placing palm on face.

[Captain39]

All the hunters in the woods & no dead panthers. All the cameras & no pics. Lets see the Sasquatch photos next!

[deer farmer]

I found cougar tracks in one of my food plots last spring, it was such a big track I thought it was a bear trac, so I took a picture of it and came home to identify it and discovered it to be a cougar track. I started wearing my sidearm after that. I also have a game camera picture of a doe that looked like she was ripped on one side of her and I am not sure if she made it, cause did not see her again. this was in Harrison co.

[duck or bleed]

Funny how there are so many if these threads, and NONE have pictures! I've seen pictures of "Sasquatch", but never the "BP"! At least the "squatchers" are posting up bad pics.

[mathewrrabon]

All these people say they have seen them, why haven't we got a pic on the tailgate?

[Captain39]

I found cougar tracks in one of my food plots last spring, it was such a big track I thought it was a bear trac, so I took a picture of it and came home to identify it and discovered it to be a cougar track. I started wearing my sidearm after that. I also have a game camera picture of a doe that looked like she was ripped on one side of her and I am not sure if she made it, cause did not see her again. this was in Harrison co.

Your wearing a side arm for an animal we have no photographs, confirmed kills or confirmed attacks on people in Texas?? You probably better off wearing that side arm for the Blank Panthers that do march!! Haha

[clinthwt]

I saw a black cougar once

[lovemylegacy]

We have a recent incident in our area where a freshly killed hog of the 165-200 lbs size was drug through some plantation over a quarter mile in one night. We also allegedly had a black cat with a long tail sighted by our pasture warden, and tracks that were supposed to be cougar-like. I did not see photos of the tracks, and do not know even if photos exist in this alleged case.
We are in northwest Polk County.

I've been hearing these stories and campfire rumors for years. Finally saw some trail camera photos from Newton County a year or two back, and some photos of a roadside kill somewhere near Liberty last year. Both these we're regular cougars of the brown color phase.

I'm very curious to see any recent real evidence (2012-13) like trail camera photos or kills in East Texas, either of a cougar or the more infrequently reported east Texas black panther-either brown or otherwise. Not hill country or south Texas- but East Texas. As in east of I45 to Sabine River.

OK, here we go! Way back in the 80s there was a mountain lion in killed in Jasper Cty....it was in the papers, since then nothing but rumors.

[Shortbow]

I have seen a picture of a black panther that was caught in a trap on a lease north of Beaumont. The cat was locked in a cattle trailer. It was solid black with yellow eyes. Supposedly they ended up letting go. I will see if I can get a picture of the pictures. The guy who has them is my exterminator who does pest inspections for my clients. He keeps the photos in his truck.

[jetlag887]

LOL..this is such BS.
BPs and 10' rattlesnakes!!

[HainesNYT]

Your wearing a side arm for an animal we have no photographs, confirmed kills or confirmed attacks on people in Texas?? You probably better off wearing that side arm for the Blank Panthers that do march!! Haha

Do Texas big cats (insert any name) have a different set of instincts then the other big cats (insert any name) across our country? Or are you not aware of the documented attacks in other states? They are rare, but they do happen. Luck favors the prepared.

[ajavelina]

There are no recorded instances of a black mt lion. There are black jaguars. Which would be illegal to kill seeing how they are an endangered species.

[Limbwalker]

Please, someone explain to me how it is impossible to have a melanistic mountain lion.

In felines[edit source | editbeta]

Melanistic coat coloration occurs as a common polymorphism in 11 of 37 felid species and reaches high population frequency in some cases but never achieves complete fixation. The black panther, a melanic form of leopard, is common in the equatorial rainforest of Malaya and the tropical rainforest on the slopes of some African mountains such as Mount Kenya. The serval also has melanic forms in certain areas of East Africa. In the jaguarundi coloration varies from dark brown and gray to light reddish. Melanic forms of jaguar are common in certain parts of South America.[9] In 1938 and 1940, two melanistic bobcats were trapped alive in sub-tropical Florida.[10]
In 2003, the dominant mode of inheritance of melanism in jaguars was confirmed by performing phenotype transmission analysis in a 116-individual captive pedigree. Melanistic animals were found to carry at least one copy of a mutant MC1R sequence allele, bearing a 15-base pair inframe deletion. Ten unrelated melanistic jaguars were either homozygous or heterozygous for this allele. A 24-base pair deletion causes the incompletely dominant allele for melanism in the jaguarundi. Sequencing of the agouti signalling peptide in the agouti gene coding region revealed a 2-base pair deletion in black domestic cats. These variants were absent in melanistic individuals of Geoffroy’s cat, oncilla, pampas cat and Asian golden cat, suggesting that melanism arose independently at least four times in the cat family.[11]
Melanism in leopards is inherited as a Mendelian, monogenic recessive trait relative to the spotted form. Pairings of black animals inter se have a significantly smaller litter size than other possible pairings.[12] Between January 1996 and March 2009, leopards were photographed at 16 sites in the Malay Peninsula in a sampling effort of more than 1000 trap nights. Of 445 photographs of melanistic leopards taken, 410 came from study sites south of the Isthmus of Kra, where the non-melanistic morph was never photographed. These data suggest the near fixation of the dark allele in the region. The expected time to fixation of this recessive allele due to genetic drift alone ranged from about 1,100 years to about 100,000 years.[13] Melanism in leopards has been hypothesized to be causally associated with a selective advantage for ambush.[14]

Of course there are mountain lions in East Texas. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone (at least, it shouldn't be). But ever since I was a young boy in the mid-70's, I've heard about "black panthers" in the woods of East Texas. I have no idea why this just won't go away.

I've said before and I'll say it again, with all the 1000's of trail cameras out there nowdays, if there was a "black panther" or bigfoot, or even a chupacabra afoot, we'd have seen an image captured by now.

[oldschool]

Nowhere, has there ever been a confirmed sighting, dead or alive, of a black cougar.
If its not a chupacabra all these people are seeing, its a jaguar.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department website observes that: “The jaguar was once fairly common over Southern Texas, and nearly the whole of the eastern part of Louisiana, and north to the Red River. The last verified record of the jaguar in Texas was around the turn of the century (1900), and this beautiful cat is now extirpated from Texas...”
This being said, there was once a subspecies of jaguar unique to Texas: panthera veraecrusis
Another factor, 6% of jaguars are black melanistic.
So, if there are black panthers in Liberty, like I've heard my whole life, they're probably random lost jaguars. But that doesn't answer the question, why are there never any sightings of regular jaguars in these same areas.
In my humble opinion, probably a hog, a dog, or a bobcat.
Heard the ole wives tale my whole life. Same thing as wolves and ivory billed woodpeckers. They're gone. The mythos of the black panther makes peoples eyes cater to their curiosity.
I know I'm a noob. I like this thread and its current.

[GarGuy]

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department website observes that: “The jaguar was once fairly common over Southern Texas, and nearly the whole of the eastern part of Louisiana, and north to the Red River. The last verified record of the jaguar in Texas was around the turn of the century (1900), and this beautiful cat is now extirpated from Texas...”

I hope TPWD updates this soon as there is a KNOWN breeding population of Jaguars along the Rio Grande North of Laredo.