Click photo to enlarge
A pair of Scottish tourists were surprised when they saw
and photographed this cat-like animal (circled), which they
claim was similar in size to an Alsatian dog, near McLeays
Creek on the Lindis Pass. Photo by Charlie Limond.
The Himalayas had their Yetis, while Canada's Sasquatch
was known informally as "Bigfoot".
And now, the Lindis Pass hill country may - or may not - have
its "Big Ginge".
Scottish tourists Charlie and Marie Limond photographed what
they described as a "lynx-sized mountain lion", at McLeays
Creek in the Lindis Pass.
"It was definitely way bigger than your domestic cat. About
the size of an Alsatian dog," Mr Limond told the Otago
Daily Times yesterday.
The couple were driving along State Highway 8, through the
Lindis Pass, last week, when Mr Limond said he saw the animal
"out of the corner of my eye".
They turned their car around and said they watched the big
cat, about 200m away, from the roadside for about seven
minutes.
"I got a real good look at it through my binoculars. Our
small digital camera wasn't able to get a decent photograph,
but it was the same goldy colour as a mountain lion," he
said.
Mr Limond was unshaken in his belief he had seen a "small
lion-like animal". He based his claims on having been to
Africa and seen lions at game parks.
However, Wanaka Area Department of Conservation manager Paul
Hellebrekers said the couple may have sighted an extremely
large feral cat.
"There is nothing to substantiate that we're not just dealing
with a very large cat," he said.
Dunstan Downs Station farmer Geva Innes laughed when the
Otago Daily Times contacted her to ask whether there
had been any reports of a "big ginger tomcat the size of a
small lion" stalking the hills.
"We shoot feral cats round here," she said.
The feral pests often roamed the hills and grew big. Feral
cats could also carry the disease toxoplasmosis, which caused
abortions in sheep, she said.
- matthew.haggart@odt.co.nz
Looks like a rock to me
Any one remember the the photo of Rodin's thinker on Mars? It was a rock and this looks like it could be as well.
And Ian is right there is absolutely no sense of scale to be had in the picture - this was also the case in the aforementioned Mars photo.
A matter of scale
Photographs such as the one of the supposedly giant cat, are meaningless as proof of anything, unless there is something else in the frame which gives a basis for comparison of 'scale'. The photograph might indeed be of something the size of an Alsatian. Equally, it might be a perfectly normal-sized domestic moggy. Most such photographs, which tend to be accepted by would-be 'believers' as the proof they would like them to be, are actually useless as 'proof' of anything, without some object of known size in-frame, to compare the animal's size against.