Cats are bad: http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1183443761

Very interesting article from the Weekend Australian Magazine:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/big-cats-prowl-the-bush/story-e6frg8h6-1225883808451

HELICOPTERS hover noisily overhead, the occupants scanning the sheep-filled paddocks, undulating grassy terrain fringed with dark, forbidding bush.

On the ground, rangers comb the property, deep in the Victorian countryside. Their hand-held radios briefly crackle into life, sounding hard and scratchy amid the dull “thwock, thwock, thwock” of the helicopter blades above. State-of-the-art thermal imaging equipment throws up heat signatures of wildlife and livestock, transforming flesh and blood into blobby splashes of red with yellow-green haloes as the rangers scan the land for something large and out-of-place. Something alien and deadly. Something on a killing spree.

Hollywood couldn’t have done it better. But this isn’t an action sequence from some creature feature; these events actually took place in 1997 on a farm near Woodside, a small town in Victoria’s Gippsland, part of an effort by the state’s Department of Sustainability and the Environment (DSE) to deal with an unknown predator that had slaughtered more than 400 sheep in two years, each victim expertly dispatched (and devoured) with the efficiency of a butcher.

DSE officials were stumped, and they were pulling out all stops to try to solve the mystery that had so far cost a Victorian farmer thousands of dollars in lost stock – and threatened the credibility of the department. Trapping, snaring and fur traps had all failed to reveal the true nature of the beast, so thermal imaging equipment was employed in an eleventh-hour bid to halt the stock losses. There was talk of wild dogs at the time, but none of the corpses bore the hallmarks of dog attacks. There was no mess and little blood, and most of the corpses were devoid of flesh with only head, hide and hooves left behind. It was, for the most part, a clean, clinical kill every time.

Just as unusual – and even more disturbing – was the discovery early one morning of several sheep standing in a field, their faces mauled beyond recognition. They were still alive – just – but where a snout should have protruded from each woolly face there was now just a mass of red, shredded flesh and broken cartilage and bone.

I'd be on the lookout for a Jolly Swagman.

That's ignorant, Mozzaok. Our feral animals have every right to be here; they are as Australian as Kangaroos or Koalas. Their frequent depredations on our so called "native" (Pah! All species were immigrants once) are due to a lack of opportunity and discrimination against them by native Kangaroos and Koalas. The size of these feral cats you speak of is due to their socioeconomic circumstances; if these cats had better access to education, they would be able to afford healthy, unprocessed foods.

shampain socialist wrote on Jun 26^th, 2010 at 10:28pm:


That's a different version...
The one I heard was that the 'panthers' were the mascots of a US Airforce unit stationed in Victoria....

I hadn't heard the 'returned or on leave servicemen' version.....

Fortunately the domestic cat does not have a gene for gigantism!