Mystery Trail Cam CreatureThis photo was taken by a motion sensor trail cam in western Kentucky on 10/16/2010 at 10:37 AM. My brother set up the cam and caught the image. He showed it to game wardens and many other people and everyone said they had never seen such an animal.
Some suggested it was some kind of monkey. I heard all this before I saw the photo for myself. When I did finally get to see it, it hit me right off. This is a cat. A house cat. It looks like a big ol' tom cat. The only other suggestion that was made that I might believe is it could be a "Fisher Cat."
I looked it up on the web and viewed many photos and am still not convinced that this is a common house cat out roaming around. The hair parts down the middle of the tail and I have seen many tomcats with tails just like that. They can also have very long tails. I would like to somehow get this mystery solved. While I think it's a tomcat, what do you think?
--Keith
This story originally appeared on the Paranormal Buffalo newsgroup, and appears courtesy of Rick. Thanks mate.
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6 comments:
My very first thought was that it looks like an ant-eater. http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/harry/bio/zoo/anteatrg.htm Quite a ways from home if it is.
There are fishers in West Virginia. However, they are in the Allegheny Highlands of West Virginia-- where the mountains are very high and there are porcupines and American red squirrels for them to hunt.
They are on the borders with Maryland and Virgnia, not Kentucky. And it's Western Kentucky--a really long way from the fishers in West Virginia.
I think we have nice, large, domestic long-hair (Felis silvestris catus).
Here's a photo of a gray fox and you can see the tail:
http://www.thevlm.org/files/Images/gray-fox.jpg
It could be a gray fox, but gray foxes have ridge of dark hair that run through the middle of the tail. They also move in a very cat-like fashion. I saw one chasing rabbits at a high speed at a distance, and I thought I had seen a small cougar.
But gray foxes do not have darker bellies and legs.
It is such a pity that the people who set up these cameras, don't have the foresight or intelligence to lay down a number of measuring sticks (broken branches / twigs) of known length, within the cameras field of view, to get at least some idea of the size of a creature passing by.
Going back to the photo, my immediate thoughts are that this creature is Canine rather than feline and certainly not a monkey.
I would suggest that we are maybe looking at something along the lines of Bernese mountain dog. Though there are quite a few other possibilities that carry the tail in a similar way, not least of which would be a black lab crossed with long coated GSD. A friend of mine had one of these and it could very easily have passed for the critter in the picture.
So much would depend on the creatures size and as there is nothing to give a sense of scale in the picture we are pretty well lost. Even very basic data such as the height of the white post, width of the path, length of the branch in the foreground, etc., would have been helpful.
i would have to say this animal is feline, if you look at the hind legs the thigh above the hock area is to long and slender for canine, and also how it steps with the front legs, its looks way to eligant for a canine and the front legs look slightly bowed which also suggests feline,i think the hair is probably parted maybe from getting wet? altogether i think the animal is to long slender and eligant looking to be anything other than a large kitty cat probably a tom cat...
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