Black panther sightings in Michigan: Fact or legend?

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Black panther sightings in Michigan: Fact or legend?
July 25, 2009
Pamela Grundy
Examiner.com

As housing developments steadily encroach upon former wildlife habitat, many animals that used to live only in the wild are being spotted roaming about suburban America.

Cougar and panther sightings in the Great Lakes area and other parts of the US have increased over the past ten years, but the question is, are they real?

Sightings of black panthers are particularly controversial, since these animals are not indigenous to the United States.

Sightings of big black cats (jungle sized cats like cougars and panthers) have had a paranormal aspect for generations.

The first non-Indian settlers of Appalachia took black panthers for a real indigenous animal, yet sightings of the creatures were denied and ridiculed by naturalists who claimed no panthers could survive in that locale.

Native peoples in that part of the U.S., on the other hand, all recognize the existence of the beast.

The Cherokee call the big black cat Klandagi, "The Lord of the Forest." The Creek Indians call the panther Katalgar, "The Greatest of Hunters." The Chickasaws call it Koe-Ishto, which means, "Cat of God." Native peoples take as a given and as a fact that mythic animal spirits are real, and that some animals can shift from the spirit world to physical reality at will; a fact that often complicates modern discussions of whether these cats are 'real' or the stuff of legend.

In the 80s and 90s, Great Britain saw its own rash of big black cat sightings. No large cats are native to Great Britain, so the phenomenon was particularly odd there, and led some observers to hypothesize that a zoo panther had perhaps escaped and found an acceptable British habitat or was living on pets and local sheep and goats. Naturalists vehemently denied the possibility of such an occurrence, but the reports kept coming anyway.

Cougars, while not native to Michigan, are common in Colorado and the Montanas, and have been seen as far east as Illinois and Missouri. In recent years, cougars have been frequently reported as far east as Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio (though such reports cannot be confirmed and are usually contested by DNR experts). They eat deer, and the midwest certainly has deer.

That doesn't mean the cougars are here eating them, but it's far from impossible.

The Cougar is a large cat (150-170 pounds), about 30 inches high, and 7-10 feet long. Some naturalists believe that melanistic cougars (all black) do exist; others believe melanistic cougars are so rare as to be unlikely to be seen, especially in locations outside their natural habitat. So the possibility of black cougars in Michigan remains an open question.

One of the most fascinating explanations of big black cat sightings is a paranormal one that meshes well with Native American belief. In the excellent but little-read book Daemonic Reality, novelist, alchemist, and scholar of all things extraordinary Patrick Harpur assigns black cat sightings to the same general category as supernatural dog sightings (like the Michigan Dogman), and Bigfoot or Sasquatch encounters.

All three creatures are commonly reported in Michigan.

Harpur notes that almost all cultures accept the existence of 'spirit animals' in a matter of fact way, incorporating them into their oral traditions and their daily life. Modern western culture is unusual and unique in denying the existence of such creatures and insisting on completely separating physical reality from imaginal reality.

The word daemon comes from a Greek word so alien to our modern way of thinking that it is difficult to translate literally, but means something close to "spirit of place." Big black cats, yetis, dogmen: these are all the spirits of wild, lonely places. To encounter any of them is to come face to face with ones own wildness, one's own internal landscape, and to be changed in the process. The encounter has as much to do with the observer as the observed.

Such was the view of ancient peoples, peoples who no longer define modern knowledge.

Their wordview may well be gone.

The creatures may not.