Phantoms will phantom

“Mystery Cats of the World: From Blue Tigers to Exmoor Beasts” is crypto-zoologist Karl P N Shuker´s classical work from 1989 about cryptid felids from all over the world. The book is interesting and fascinating, and if you can´t get hold of it, don´t worry, Shuker is still active and maintains a blog where he discusses many of the elusive creatures mentioned in this fine work. “Mystery Cats of the World” could be seen as Shuker´s attempt to write an exclusively felid version of Heuvelman´s classic “On the Track of Unknown Animals”. If that was the purpose, I say the author succeeded eminently well.

Some of the cryptid cats discussed in the book are probably just unusual color morphs of known species, including spotted lions or blue tigers. There are also reports of known species outside their “normal” range, such as leopards on the Indonesian island of Bali. More contentious are claims about black cougars in the eastern part of the United States – here, both the color and the range are wrong! Other creatures discussed by Shuker must be species entirely new to science, such as the Onza in Mexico, which supposedly has both cougar-like and cheetah-like traits. Still other mystery beasts sound too good to be true, such as surviving saber-toothed cats or marsupial lions. Shuker has also included reports that straddle the paranormal, although he of course believes they are about real animals. The Alien Big Cats or ABCs – often black panthers – showing up in the UK, the US and Australia are cases in point. Pack-hunting felids in the Amazon (which nobody has actually seen, although their screams scare the living day lights out of the Natives) or aquatic jaguar-like creatures in Paraguay also sound folkloric rather than really real.

While the material in “Mystery Cats” is interesting, I must say that I´ve become more negative towards crypto-zoology lately. As already indicated, most of the phantom cats discussed in Shuker´s book from 1989 are *still* discussed by the very same author on his blog 30 years later, suggesting that very little has changed. The phantoms are still phantoms. Note also that many of the mystery felines have been "seen" by eye-witnesses since before World War II. It seems extremely unlikely to the present reviewer that dozens of big cat species are still unaccounted for after 100 years, bearing in mind the encroachments on nature by humans during the same period, not to mention all the scientific and non-scientific expeditions to various remote corners of the globe. Even specific attempts to catch a cryptid cat have failed – such as the hunt for the Exmoor Beast organized by the British Marines. Nor has there been any road kills on American highways or bush meat specimens at Vietnamese markets. Of all the dozens or so cryptid forms described in Shuker´s book, it seems that only one has been confirmed by science: the Kellas cat, which turned out to be a hybrid between Scottish wildcats and domestics. The Onza specimen reported in the book was just an unnaturally gracile cougar (proven by DNA tests). The author may not like it, but misidentification *is* much more likely in many cases than the specimen being a truly new species.

People see strange things all the time, including things which simply cannot be real. The peasants in the Swedish province of Småland encountered impossibly large snakes and dragons during the latter half of the 19^th century in areas which were apparently inhabited by humans. Of course, we know that no such creature ever existed. Some of them *can´t* be real, anymore than the Jersey Devil (see my review of “Om Draken eller Lindormen” by Hyltén-Cavallius). In the same way, we know that many of the tales collected in “Strange Creatures Seldom Seen” (also reviewed by me on this blog) can´t be true either, and so on. How likely is it that a breeding population of black panthers have survived in the UK for generations without the authorities (who have been *looking for it*, remember?) being able to apprehend a single one? The only way to save the appearances in this case is to postulate that many of the cryptids are really paranormal entities. Maybe they are, but that´s an entirely different proposition (and entirely different discussion) than the one we´re conducting right now…

My prediction is that “Mystery Cats of the World” will feel just as fresh in another 30 years - since exactly the same Alien Big Cats will still be at large. But sure, I could be wrong. The timeline *is* strange, so if we´re really lucky, perhaps a blue tiger or surviving saber-tooth will soon be apprehended somewhere in Suburbia. Probably by Donald Trump!