NEWSLINK: Craig Pittman’s Cat Tale captures the Florida panther’s extinction scare

If you are very lucky, and you are not a toy poodle or a deer, and if you spend any time at all in the Florida outdoors, you may be in for a treat some day soon: the sight of a panther in its natural element.


By his reckoning, Tampa Bay Times reporter Craig Pittman has laid eyes on Florida panthers exactly three times. “The first one I ever saw was dead, run down by a speeding vehicle on Interstate 4, closer to Walt Disney World than to the place where panthers normally are found,” he writes in Cat Tale. The second was in a roadside zoo, and the third was a taxidermic specimen in the State Archives in Tallahassee — a specimen that plays an important part in his narrative.

“That’s three more panthers than most Floridians have ever seen,” Pittman reckons, even if only one of the cats was actually alive.

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