Mid-Canterbury's elusive black panther may have moved south. Last week a delivery driver spotted what he described as a
large cat-like animal feeding on road kill just outside the
Fairlie township in the early hours of the morning.
The description was remarkably similar to reports in a number
of sightings of the panther-like animal in Mid Canterbury
roughly the size of a labrador dog, with round head and a
distinctive long tail. Such sightings began trickling in 1992 when the animal was
spotted at the Ashburton River mouth.
But the legend really took flight this century when Marcus
Ewart and David Tutton reported seeing a large, black
panther-like cat near Alford Forest; two years later the cat
appeared again, this time witnessed by Peter and Toni May in
the Ashburton Gorge.
A month later, in October 2003, truck driver Chad Stewart was
startled by a huge black cat in the Mayfield foothills. The
same month the cat appeared again, this time near the Fairton
meat works.
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The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper column-inches than any other cryptozoological subject. There are so many of them now that we feel that they should be archived by us in some way, so we should have a go at publishing a regular round-up of the stories as they come in. Curated by Carl Marshall and Olivia McCarthy
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