There are legendary big cats in Michigan, and I don't mean the Detroit Tigers or Lions. During the past five years, many southeastern Michiganders claim to have sighted black panthers - the felines, not the political activists - running wild just 30 or 40 miles outside of Motown.
Phantom panthers were reported in Manchester, Mich., in 1984, in Milford in 1986, and in Imlay City this spring. And recently a woman, spotting a beast slinking through a nearby field, videotaped it from the deck of her home.However, investigators from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources repeated the taping while an agent walked a pet cougar through the same field. When the two video shots were superimposed, the "panther" was very small compared to the real cougar. The subject of the woman's video must have been about the size of a house cat, which is probably what the woman saw.
Bill Walker, writing in the Ann Arbor News, summed up the Michigan panther scares in an article headlined "Big cat sightings fiction so far."
And if the DNR experiment didn't cast enought doubt on the reports, there are lots of holes in the stories about beasts roaming southern Michigan.
The Milford panther, for example, was supposed to have been responsible for killing a horse and ripping open its throat. But an animal expert determined that the wound on the horse's neck "was a wound a cat could not make. There were no tooth punctures or claw marks on the animal, just the gash."
He believed that the horse had accidentally slashed its own neck on a barbed-wire fence. In the soft earth of a drainage ditch where a panther had supposedly been sighted, trackers found only coon and dog prints.
Walker also pointed out that a big cat would have to eat a good-size animal every week or so in order to survive. But an escaped pet cougar would lack hunting skills and probably "turn up on back porches looking for handouts."
There were no reports of missing farm stock or of huge pussycats parked on porches in downstate Michigan.
Two Milford police officers thought they spotted a panther through the night-scopes on their rifles, but the scopes proved to have weak batteries that had caused spots on the viewing field.
If a real black panther does show up in Michigan, it will be a long way from home. It would have to be either a black jaguar from Central or South America or a black leopard from Africa or Asia, since there are no black panthers native to the United States.
Black panthers are common in American folklore, though. Someone fleetingly sees a shadow, a common wild animal or a roaming pet, and he or she interprets the sight in terms of familiar folktales and legends.
In Britain, alleged sightings of "The Surrey Puma" and of a big cat dubbed "The Exmoor Beast" have made the news in the past decade. But no one has killed, captured or photographed a big cat there either.
A typical article, by Nicholas Coleridge, appeared in the English newspaper The Standard. It described an incident occurring near a village called Stokenchurch, High Wycomb, in which the big cat "disturbed a canoodling couple in a clump of winter gorse."
I haven't heard any stories of panthers disturbing canoodling Michiganders.