I've always enjoyed the black panther discussions; been hearing them my whole life. Every one of my HS Ag students had a story about them in the 70s. Kids today don't even have good stories to tell.

But even I had a couple of encounters I couldn't explain. In the early 70s my grandfather and I were setting a trap line in Wilcox county and came across a track on a sandbed by a creek. We both said it was a bobcat track, but it was 4 times as big as a bobcat. He had supported his family by trapping during the depression and knew far more about trapping and fur bearing critters and that track scared him to death. There was a Florida panther hanging around his home in the 30s that kept the whole neighborhood scared and he saw it's track many times and knew what one looked like. He eventually shot at him with an old SxS shotgun and they never saw it again. He didn't think he killed it, but just ran it off. He was convinced that the track in Wilcox was made by the same type animal. There were no cameras in the woods in those days, so maybe it was.

About a year later I was driving through Lowndes county on a rural road just after sunset when an animal bounded out of the woods to the right and crossed to my left. It was the size of a really big bobcat, or maybe even a little bigger than that. It was colored like a bobcat, and it ran like a bobcat. The unusual part was that it had a tail as long as the rest of his body. I don't know what that could have been except a juvenile cougar of some sort, and he either came from FL or somewhere north. That was nearly 50 years ago and Lowndes was a lot wilder than it is now. I described the animal to a number of folks at Auburn soon after it happened and the story wasn't doubted back then the way it is now. Some today will say it was a coyote, but a coyote would have been just as unusual as big cat in 1975, and I really believe I have enough experience to tell the difference in a cat and a canine.

So there's 2 encounters my family had with big cats, though one was 90 years ago and the other about 50. I think it's possible some could pass through the state, but it couldn't be many or all those cameras would get pictures. Suits me if they stay out anyway.

Now I don't see how anyone could doubt the existence of a Yahoo. Plenty of evidence for them.