Yes. Indiana, not India.
ABC News reports:
An Indiana woman trying to protect her cats from wild animal attacks was stunned to discover that the animal she and her boyfriend shot, thinking it was a bobcat prowling in her backyard, was actually a leopard, and now authorities are trying to determine how it got there.
Officials at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources confirmed that a leopard, which is not native to North America — let alone Indiana — was found at the woman’s residence in Charlestown. The DNR is investigating where the animal might have come from.
Donna Duke, a friend and neighbor of the woman who found the leopard, told ABC affiliate WDRB-TV in Louisville, Ky., that the woman had been concerned about her cats after a spate of attacks on pets in her area..
“She’s got cats that are basically her family,” Duke told WCRB.
According to Duke, the woman and her boyfriend stayed up all night Thursday to determine whether there was a bobcat loose in their area. When they saw the big cat in the woods at the edge of her property, the woman’s boyfriend shot and killed the animal before it could get any closer, not realizing it was a leopard.
Residents of Indiana are allowed to own exotic large cats but they must have a permit. The owner of a local wildlife refuge center located near the woman’s home told WDRB-TV that none of his animals were missing.
Wow.
There are Alien Big Cats out there, but to prove their existence, we need a body. These bodies are strangely lacking in the UK, where there is a strong cultural tradition of big black cats. Americans own lots of inappropriate wildlife. Many states, including Indiana, really don’t regulate the ownership of these animals.
After all, Indiana and most other states like it assume that their citizens have some common sense!
I don’t think there is a freely breeding population of leopards in Indiana or Kentucky, but it is possible that an escapee can last a while out in the bush.
And long-time readers of the blog know that I once made a comparison between letting pet cats wander and turning out a leopard into a neighborhood.
When this actually happened, you can see what the reaction was.
The leopard wound up dead.
There is now a lot of discussion in many states and at the federal level about how to regulate private ownership of big cats.
Some people want it banned entirely– which I think sounds good in theory.
But there are so many privately owned big cats in America that it is going to be next to impossible to regulate anything.
A ban will work about as well as a ban on marijuana or booze.
It could actually make things worse.
People could start turning their animals out into the wild, or moving so far back into remote areas with them that the cats never see a veterinarian and get proper care or housing.
What we need is an effective regulatory regime.
I don’t know why people want to own animals like leopards. but they do.
And maybe the best course of action is to find commonsense regulations on their ownership.
At very least, there should be prison time for anyone who intentionally releases one of these animals into wild.
These animals deserve so much better, but we need to think it through.
Good intentions can occasionally bring about very negative unforeseen consequences.
I don’t the North America needs a population of freely breeding leopards running around.
But we could get it if we don’t carefully consider how we are going to regulate their ownership.
Some might doubt whether these animals could survive long enough in the wild to become proficient hunters of deer, but the truth is this one was hunting house pets– much easier prey.
It’s very sad that this poor leopard lost its life. When it is fully examined, my guess is that they will find that it only recently escaped or was released from the wild.
It’s a strange animal to keep as a pet.
But people have always tried to tame the big Carnivorans.
We managed to domesticate only one.
So far…
And some people just won’t give up, no matter how many dogs and cats and kids get killed.
.
While it would be irresponsible and incorrect of me to say that leopards make good pets, those that are kept as pets can be very devoted to their people. There are some people who live in Africa, on ranches or game preserves for instance, who have leopards that they raised as orphaned cubs (for instance) who allow them to coma and go as they please, and the leopards remain friendly with the people and even with their dogs (leopards have a reputation as preferentially preying on domestic dogs in some areas, so a leopard that’s friendly with dogs is a big deal).
That being said, captive leopards can and have killed their owners. So even though some leopards might be OK with some people, there’s never a guarantee. They’re considered by many experienced handlers to be the most intelligent of the big cats, and they are certainly the most adaptable. Leopards have no problem living near people, even; they’ve even been found living in large cities such as Nairobi and Bangalore. I have no doubt that a healthy young adult leopard could survive on its own just about anywhere in America.
A viable breeding population is another story. For them to breed & survive for more than a generation or two, there would need to be a least several dozen relatively unrelated animals within a broad enough range to sustain them. But of all the cats, large or small, I’d place my bet on leopards as the species most likely to succeed (other than domestic cats, of course) in the wild in America, in the event that animals were released from captivity.
This leopard looks like a young one, not yet full-grown, to me. Probably being kept illegally, without a permit. I’ll be surprised if they ever locate the owner, unless someone informs on them.
I think it’s a young one, too. The proportions aren’t right.
I’d put its age at about 6-8 months old.
*come and go, not “coma and go” ;-p
It has to be done like falconry. There has to be a system of apprenticeship and certification before you get one.
If you ban it, you will create a siege mentality, which is the absolute last thing you actually do want when you want people to do things in the best interest of the animal.
I worry about the negative consequence of a ban as much as worry about all the horrible and stupid things that are happening to them right now.
Yes. That’s one thing that happened in Great Britain when they were peremptorily banned in 1976. They forgot to make it illegal to just abandon exotic pets into the countryside & that’s exactly what a lot of people – no one knows how many – did.
I agree. Don’t BAN them, exactly, but require education, hands-on apprenticeship, and licensing. Plus DNA profiling and mandatory microchipping . And much more stringent regulations on housing and care.
It was probably hanging around houses expecting someone to feed it. I wish they had not killed it. I guess they thought it was a bobcat, but is it legal to shoot even a bobcat in a residential area if it’s not actually threatening anyone?
This tiger mauling happened in Indiana, too.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/tiger-attack-leaves-indiana-woman-condition/story?id=19464198#.Uce8ONK7I8J
The USDA is supposed to regulate these things as far as I know, but they ten to be understaffed and overwhelmed on this front. I don’t think the gov’t wants to spend too many tax dollars on these issues, as it’s a “special interest.”
The DWA act 1976 only banned the ownership of certain species without a license, it didn’t and hasn’t outright banned the ownership of any species, as far as I can remember, might be wrong though.
It has been amended a couple of times, most recently the rules on keeping crosses of wild and domestic dogs and cats have been relaxed a little. Before, any animal that was the result of the intentional crossing of any wild dog/cat covered under the act, with a domestic one was subject to licensing regardless as to how many generations removed from the wild dog/cat input it was.
Now, its only the wild dog/cat and the first and second generation offspring that require a licence, anything beyond that is considered domestic and can be kept as such.
However, when the DWA was first introduced many people didn’t want, or couldn’t afford to pay the extra costs of keeping their pets legally. Understandable, as it isn’t cheap, especially if you keep large animals such as leopards or wolves. So sightings of leopards etc at the time were probably accurate, today? More fantasy I’d say.
A place called TSKA exotics used to sell big cats to private UK keepers, not sure if they’re still around, its been a couple of years since I last looked into this area.
The system certainly has its failings.
Thanks for the info.
Interesting.
I agree it looks young. I expect someone brought it as a kitten and when it grew too much for them they let it go.
I also agree about not banning ownership. People will just dump them then and I think at least in the states they could survive. As someone says that’s what happened in the UK but I think the dumped ones probably just died off. In the states you have far greater variance in terrain and more space for a breeding population to establish.
Bizarre reference but I remember reading the book the ”postman” (much better than the move btw). There was a very small piece in this about escaped zoo leopards breeding with cougars. Would this be possible?
Also isn’t captive pets making up a big proportion of some species, e;g more tigers in private collections in the states then wild in india?
Btw the bsl on pits in the UK creates the siege mentality. People owning/breeding pits in secret.
Adam
“There was a very small piece in this about escaped zoo leopards breeding with cougars. Would this be possible?”
Hi Adam; The American cougar (Puma concolor) with 38 chromosomes, is genetically closer to domestic cats and cheetahs than to the big cats such as the leopard (Panthera pardus), which has 36 chromosomes. However, both the keepers in the Ringling Bros Circus and Carl Hagenbeck at the Hamburg zoo, reportedly bred several litters of puma x leopard hybrids (pumapards) between 1896 & 1898.
I haven’t found any data as to whether the cross was fertile but following other out-crosses such as the mule, its possible that the female F1s could cross successfully with a leopard. If so, the results would be, at least in terms of atDNA, leopards (the mtDNA would of course be that of the mother).
See http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hyb-pumaxleop.htm & http://www.tutorgigpedia.com/ed/Congolese_Spotted_Lion#Fertility_and_breeding
Trust me, they don’t breed them in secret, so called pitbull types are all over the place here. I say so called, as most will simply be sbt crosses, but that can be enough to get them seized. It’s not the breed that is banned, it’s pitbull, Dogo, Fila and Tosa types that are banned.
So, if it looks enough like a duck, walks enough like a duck, doesn’t matter if it’s a swan.
Accept for the isle of Mann, where Dogo’s are perfectly legal.
I think that it’s possible to imagine a scenario in which a leopard and a puma would mate, on their own, without direct human intervention. It would be one of those things that would be so rare it’d be like hitting the lottery, though.
But imagine this: An intact, unspayed young adult female leopard is released or escapes from captivity in an area where there are very few cougars. She has had one litter of three cubs a couple of years ago, while she was still in captivity, and she took good care of them until they were taken away from her to be hand-reared for tameness.
Perhaps it’s a place where mountain lions have been “extirpated” or where young males are dispersing eastward. Southern Missouri, say, or northwest Georgia. It’s springtime and she manages to survive in the forest, hunting small game and the occasional fawn or occasional dog or cat. She goes into heat & begins calling and rolling, as cats will.
There are no other leopards anywhere around, but there’s a young tom puma in the area. He’s never mated before but he knows love when he smells it :-D. After some initial hissing and swatting, they get the deed done. She hangs with him for a few weeks & they meet up intermittently but they go their separate ways.
The leopard has three cubs, again: a male and two females. The cubs survive but the male dies over the winter. Two years later, the females leave their mother. They are smaller than either parent, but they are well-camouflaged and adept at hunting small to medium sized game. Occasionally the run across the now-experienced tom, and mate with him. One manages to raise one female kitten and the other raises two, a male and a female. The male is sterile, but the females are fertile. By the time they are old enough to breed, the old tom has been killed on the highway and a couple of brothers have assumed his range. They mate with the 1/4 leopard females as well as with their 1/2 leopard mother. In the meantime the leopard had produced another litter of three, but only one survived to adulthood.
You can see where I’m going with this. Although very improbable, an incredible long shot, it could happen this way. In small cat hybrids and ligers, many of the F1 females are fertile but no makes. But after about the fourth generation, small hybrid cats begin to produce fertile males again. If the same holds true for “pumapards”, perhaps leopard genes could be introduced locally in to the native cougar population.
Now imagine that first female leopard was black … melanism is recessive in leopards, but no one knows how it would be in pumas, because no melanistic puma has yet been found. If it was recessive, though, it’s possible that any given tawny cougar might carry the recessive. Even if none did, the recessive for melanism could be introduced through breeding with a black leopard. Maybe in time, if fertile hybrid males did begin to show up in F4 and later generations, maybe, just maybe, black pumas would eventually occur.
There are some photos of pumapards at the messybeast website:
http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hyb-pumaxleop.htm
The big problems with this scenario are;
1) male pumapards would almost certainly be sterile; and 2) the pumapard is markedly smaller than either of its parent species. Thus it would fit into an econiche different from either of that of its parents and upon meeting an example of either species, might be considered prey by them rather than as a potential mate.
Of course I can’t find it now when I need it but I recently ran across a treatise that talked about how the chromosomes align during fertilization in a hybrid back-cross to a parent species where the parents of the hybrid had differing numbers of chromosomes.
As I recall, the chromosomes hew back to the pattern of the parent species w/ the fewest number of chromosomes (in this case the leopard) so that the resulting F2 is, depending on the father’s species, either a genetic member of that parent species—presumably with 50% of the its DNA carried over from the other species—that would then be able to produce fertile offspring, both male and female, w/ another member of that species; or a hybrid like its mother.
Assuming the above is correct then in this particular instance, if the father of the F2 is a leopard (36 chromosomes), the F2 will also be, for genetic purposes, a leopard. If the father is a puma (38 chromosomes) however, the resulting F3s will be pumapards (37 chromosomes) like their mother—presumably markedly smaller than either leopard or puma, w/ all the males being sterile.
Thus the crosses you postulate would continue to be genetic pumapards w/ 37 chromosomes and thus need to continue outcrossing in perpetuity to pumas to maintain a viable population. The questions here would be, how many generations of outcrossing to pumas would be necessary before the resulting hybrids would be morphologically indistinguishable from pumas, and would the resulting population be considered a separate species from P. concolor?
What pissed me off from the get-go is that they had no compunctions about shooting a native Bobcat to protect their free-roaming domestic cats. That’s just bass-ackwards! As for the leopard, I’m sorry it was shot but it has no more place roaming free in the US than does the Burmese python, nutria or for that matter, the domestic cat.
Bobcats in WV have a season. They must be tagged and checked in. You can’t just shoot them!
I’m sure they do. I’m also sure that WV considers them fur animals not ‘varmints’. And the season sure as hell wasn’t approved to protect free-roaming domestic cats.
Exceptions are usually made for predators that are endangering pets and wildlife on your property; it’s generally legal in most states to use deadly force in that situation. I’m astonished that the fish& game person would advise them to just start blazing away at a bobcat, though. That just doesn’t smell right. Wouldn’t they first advise them to keep the pets and pet food inside? That’s what they do everywhere else in the country when someone reports a wild predator preying on pets.
Not to put too fine a point on it. But those domestic cats wouldn’t have been endangered if they’d been kept inside where they belong.
I agree with you massugu.
I’ve seen alligators for sale on craigslist. D: Alligators in Indiana crazy.
They belong in my home state Louisiana not Indiana.
I think it is nuts that people try to own these animals like this especially when they don’t have money for proper care and environment for the animal.
Heck most people can’t properly take care of dog much less wild animal.
Regulation of things that are ‘few and far between’ is expensive. I have little hope the regulators will get this right. Incidents like this will happen from time to time, given the number of exotics presently in the US.
Personally, I don’t see a lot of difference between keeping a leopard and keeping a very large, aggressive dog (eg Fila, particularly CAFIB registry). The dog may be worse, as it would stand a better chance of surviving and reproducing in the wild over most of the Continent, and is less likely to be afraid of people.
I don’t think that, pound for pound, there’s any dog as powerful and dangerous as a cat. But this one’s very young. You can tell by its proportions and also look at its fur: it still has the somewhat shaggy appearance of a cub, and the spots from about the stifle on down still look “solid” & haven’t yet developed the brown spot in the center. It couldn’t have survived on its own, it’s too young. It must have been under someone’s care until shortly before it escaped or was released. This whole story has an odd “feel” to it. Maybe the exotic pet rescue guy knows more than he’s saying. He certainly seemed evasive to me, in the televised interview.
I think captive species that are truly captive, e;g just in the house or pen instead of coming and going like cats or going on off leash walks like well treated dogs have a pretty hard time surviving if they are suddenly released.
Quite aside from anything else an animal in a house or pen is just not very fit and if it suddenly finds itself having to survive in the real world and hunt for a living it won’t be capable of it, hence it turns to domestic species and like this leopard gets itself shot. Also not habituated to the environment so wastes a lot of energy on checking stuff out, plus of course doesn’t know that cars/people with guns/predators are not safe!
Re pits in the UK, yes you are correct a lot of pits are just sbt crosses. However I’ve no doubt people are deliberately breeding pure pits and have been since the ban ”under cover”.
Re the attraction to owning a big cat or other wild animal. I expect it depends on the individual. How many people own exotic (for their area) breeds of dog, and why? Maybe they like the breed/species as its own thing. Maybe its the status symbol thing, maybe they like the idea of owning something wild/different.
Re them shooting it to protect their cats, this was my point in another topic. People prefer their pets to the wild animals and have to qualms about ending the wild animals if it helps their pets.
Look at wolf reintroduction programs. Wolves will kill livestock but ranchers can be compensated. Wolves will kill pets (dogs mostly) can’t compensate someone for their beloved dog so the wolf gets shot.
Adam