Bobcats do have a melanistic phase. All of the dozen or so specimens that have been found have come from southern Florida.

Pumas do have dark skin and dark underfur. I think that some of the “black panther” sightings are of normal colored pumas, glimpsed for a few seconds under poor light conditions. Of course, a lot of the sightings are misidentifications too.

But I would not rule out the possibility of a black phase.

I think that there are probably pumas in Mississippi, a few anyway. Probably some are abandoned pets, but some are probably pumas dispersing eastward. And there may have been a few there all along.

Their budgets and agendas are controlled by these and they can’t be bothered by any other critter you can’t hunt. Besides, you don’t have to manage habitat for critters that don’t officially exist. If it ain’t there we don’t have to fool with it. So, no sir, we ain’t got no panthers in Mississippi.

Setting aside Larry Castle’s generally unfortunate tone, (”those are kitty cats” [And those who claim otherwise? "Those are idiots."]) I find myself left almost - ALMOST -speechless by his logical processes:

- because people claiming they’ve seen large black cats refer to them as ‘panthers’, nobody need pay them any heed?

- because there’s no “physical evidence”, then “numerous videos”, and “an untold number of photos” can be disregarded?

It may be Larry Castle didn’t intend coming across the way he actually has, but if “numerous videos”, and “an untold number of photos” don’t amount to evidence in his part of the world, then so long as you don’t leave any fingerprints - or footprints - you apparently don’t need to worry about things like CCTV when you hold-up liquor stores in Mississippi.

He fails to ask why the color of the cat (black) is significant (as mentioned in DWA’s post it is commonly accepted that there is no melanistic phase of felis concolor, nor any breeding populations of any hue east of the Mississippi, with the exception of Florida), and he fails to mention any reported sightings, history of sightings, etc.

I’ve grown up in the woods my whole life and I’ve never seen a black panther. But I’ve heard stories, listened to old-timers describe the “scream” as being “like a woman” or “a baby”, and have even had seasoned hunting partners share with me, in confidence, stories of large tawny cats they have spotted while turkey hunting in Kentucky and Ohio.

Adams County Ohio is rife with stories of “panthers” and my own father swears that, while staying with his grandmother as a child, a large cat put its forepaws on a window ledge to balance itself while it peered in at him as he lay in bed.

Maybe there is nothing to the stories being circulated in Mississippi. But the reporter here chooses not to share any of those stories with us, instead jumping straight to the official dismissal phase.

What I want to know is, why did the paper contact the Department of Wildlife in the first place?

The man lives in a small house about a quarter mile east of that bridge on the south side of Bethel rd. I don’t know his name or phone number. If you live in MS , and are looking for info on panthers , you may want to look this guy up. There are numerous goat farms in the area , so I can see how they might do well there.