Not quite. There are no specimens in the country presently. If there were they’d be illegal and the fines are huge (along with the jail time). Stopping it now really is a good thing. We have a history of exotics going beserk in this country. Dingos, Cane Toads, Goats, Pigs, Cats, Rabbits and more. In some instances it’s been like the little old lady who swallowed a fly, so she swallowed a spider, then swallowed a bird… We bring in Cane Toads to eat Cane Beetles, they ignore the beetles and eat everything else, kill most predators with their poison. Foxes to catch rabbits – that failed. Heck, we’ve even got Cichlids and Guppies and Goldfish in the river systems and in many cases wiping out native fish entirely (not to mention the introduction of European Carp, Trout, RedFin et al). So far, since the import rules were truly enforced, we’ve been very successful in keeping out others. People do bring them in, but they do get caught. Of the forty mammal species known to have vanished in the world in the last 200 years, almost half have been Australian.

Would a Savannah eat rabbits?

Think about no-smoking areas – although I don’t know if it’s the same worldwide – I think Australia might be a leader in this regard. The idea of non-smoking areas used to be preposterous, but they were introduced and gradually more and more areas have become non-smoking. My local paper reports numerous councils in Sydney now banning smoking in all public open spaces (i.e. parks) – can you imagine that?

Now – there is a couple here in Australia who had begun setting up a business to import and sell these cats. They’re threatening to sue the government (that earlier backed their enterprising plan) for the change of mind. I see their point. They bought land, built fences, took deposits from buyers and made commitments to their supplier. They want to claim A$2 million in damages. My question is – if any savannah cat did get into the wild and kill native fauna, would they be volunteering A$2 million to control the problem?

When a dog gets off its owner’s property and attacks a child, the owner is fined. Most native fauna is protected. When a cat gets off a property and kills native fauna, why aren’t the owner’s fined? Because you can’t police that. But the reality is that the choice to import breeds like the savannah cat result in loss of native fauna upon which you can’t place a monetary value.

Although the video, like most videos of “mysterious” creatures, is of poor quality, it does show a distinctly striped, not spotted, tabby cat prowling through some undergrowth, which stops and apparently relieves itself, then moves on.

To me, it does not look like a Savannah, which I’ve seen at TICA cat shows, or any other “exotic” cat breed, but an ordinary large tabby Domestic Shorthair.

The rounded head, smallish pointy ears and legs that are of normal house cat proportions just don’t say, “Savannah Cat” to me. How this distinctly striped kitty could have been mistaken for a “cougar” is beyond me!

It could be a Bengal, which was originally created by crossing domestic cats with Asian Leopard Cats (Felis bengalensis), and which have been bred Bengal-to-Bengal now for many, many generations, but the video is just not clear enough. I’d still wager it’s an ordinary, if somewhat large, domestic cat, and that weights of “50 pounds” are greatly exaggerated.

People DO tend to overestimate the size and weight of animals, even their own pets, often by a large margin, so it would not surprise me that someone would look at a 20-pound tabby and greatly overestimate its size. I still don’t see how it could be mistaken for a cougar, though!