Residents of the Route 66 town of Galena, Kan., can rest easier. The animal seen on a surveillance video a few days ago was a common house cat, not a cougar or mountain lion, reported the Joplin (Mo.) Globe.
The city’s police department eliminated the possibility of a big cat with help from the state’s Department of Wildlife and Parks:
Peek and two others from the department traveled to Galena last Thursday with a digital camera and a 15-inch-tall by 64-inch-long piece of cardboard to conduct their own experiment. The cardboard was placed in the spot where the cat is seen on the surveillance video and was photographed.
“The length was meant to represent an approximate length of a small adult or subadult mountain lion, but the lion would be 1.5 or two times as tall as the cardboard,” Peek wrote in his report. “The animal in the surveillance footage is nowhere near that.”
He wrote that based on comparisons of the surveillance footage and the experiment photos, the animal in the video is just over 20 inches long, consistent with a house cat.
Peek wrote that mountain lions have proportionally smaller heads than house cats, and mountain lions have proportionally longer tails than house cats.
And the large paw prints found at the scene? Peek wrote that he viewed photos of the prints and saw others while in Galena, and he identified them as dog tracks.
The wildlife biologist said the largest feline that would be natural to that region is a bobcat. The chance of a cougar or mountain lion being in that vicinity is remote.
It seemed like a lot of hubbub of what turned out to be a common cat. But the police chief said if the animal had been a cougar, the town would have had a public safety problem.