Black Panthers in Georgia???

Guess ima just have to catch one!

Throwback said:

I want to see an albino black panther. That would be a sight!

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My uncle saw one once. It was late one night, and he was out shining rabbits up in undisclosed portion of Dawson county. One ran in front of his F100 across the dirt road right be a creek. It scared him so bad that after that he wouldn't go to the outhouse without a lantern and a whooping stick. He still tells the story about that albino melanistic phase puma concolor. He got a real good look at it, so he knew for sure that's what it was. Said it practically did the macarena there in the amber glow of his old Ford headlights. After it crossed the road, he heard it scream like a woman so you know it had to be some sort of cougar. He called the DNR and told them. Warden said they'd gotten a lot of calls about that one. They'd named him the ghost of the black panther, but they couldn't do anything about it and the state biologist wouldn't listen no how.

rydert said:

I wish i could see one........

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On November 8th, go to a voting precinct in Philadelphia.

I hear they show up there regularly.

NCHillbilly said:

There are melanistic jaguars in the Amazon Basin of South America, but they are extremely rare even there. Ditto with black leopards in Asia and Africa. The melanism (black) gene is recessive. So-even if two captive black panthers somehow managed to escape and find each other in the woods of Georgia, 99% of any offspring they produced would be spotted, normally colored jaguars or leopards. But, strangely, enough, nobody ever sees those.

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But that's a jaguar, not a panther. And they'd have to travel a heck of a long way to make it to GA.

abcmh said:

Apparently biologist have not seen what I'v seen and to say something does not exist for a fact is like saying their are no pythons in north america

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It's a well known fact that there is a python problem in Florida.

Regular panthers in GA? Sure, there is the occasional wanderer from the Florida swamps.

Black panthers? No. There are no black panthers. Rare Black jaguars down in the Amazon, yes. But no black panthers.

ryanh487 said:

But that's a jaguar, not a panther. And they'd have to travel a heck of a long way to make it to GA.

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Mountain lions (or whatever you want to call them), jaguars, and leopards are all considered panthers. Jaguars and leopards are in the genus Panthera

ryanh487 said:

But that's a jaguar, not a panther. And they'd have to travel a heck of a long way to make it to GA.

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There is no official "panther." "Panther" is a generic common name used all over the world for medium-sized slinky big cats like leopards, jaguars, and pumas.

By the way, the only two big cats known to have one pop out occasionally in the black color phase (leopards and jaguars,) physically cannot "scream." They are roaring cats, like all the cats in the Panthera genus. Mountain lion/puma/painter/cougar is in the genus Puma, and there has never in hundreds of years of recorded history been a black one confirmed. There are no black panthers in Georgia, or anywhere else in North America outside of a zoo, period. A young dispersing male puma/painter/mountain lion/cougar is liable to pop up anywhere in the country, but there is no evidence of any breeding population of them in the east outside of Florida, and perhaps western Tennessee.

If folks would just put some game cameras in the woods we would have an answer...

saltysenior said:

If folks would just put some game cameras in the woods we would have an answer...

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Maybe a government trail camera subsidy is in order for research purposes