Cougars have re-established themselves in Ontario, which means that cougars are recolonizing the Eastern parts of North America using the same path through the Great Lakes region that Western coyotes used decades before. Western coyotes crossed with the few remaining wolves in the region became the modern Eastern coyote.
The evidence for cougars in Ontario comes from this recent paper by Rick Rosatte that was based upon camera trap images. Cougars are in Ontario.
However, the camera traps also caught images of a black cat, which Rosate claims are jaguars or some exotic species. His reasoning behind calling these animals exotic is that no black cougar has been seen in North America.
The image above was captured near the city of Guelph. Guelph is a mid-sized city, roughly halfway between Michigan and New York State in that part of Southern Ontario that bridges the two states.
No scale is given in the photograph to give us any idea of the size of the cat. I don’t know how we know this animal is large. It could be a black domestic cat. One cannot even get a good look at the ears of the cat, which do appear to be rounded, but that rounded shape could just be how the cat is holding its ears in the photo.
But if the animal is the size of a cougar, then it is much more likely that it is a black cougar than some exotic species.
Why?
Because jaguars don’t live in Canada. Their range in the United States is horribly truncated. One wanders up into Arizona or New Mexico every couple of years, but they once ranged up to the Grand Canyon and as far east as western Louisiana. Incidentally, those places are nowhere near Canada.
Further, no black jaguar has been spotted in North America– ever. All North American jaguars, which live in Mexico and Central America, are spotted.
They are not well-adapted to living in frigid climates. Although they were wide-ranging in North America during the Pleistocene, modern jaguars have never been found in places where the winters are as harsh as they are in Ontario.
Now, someone will say “What about a leopard? Don’t leopards live in the Russian Far East, Manchuria, and North Korea?” They do, but that’s only one subspecies. The Amur leopard is a specialized subspecies of leopard that has evolved to live in very cold conditions, and there are leopards in Central Asia that have adapted to colder climates.
All of these leopards are from subspecies in which only spotted individuals exist.
Black leopards are found only in certain tropical subspecies. Leopards on the southern end of the Malay Peninsula are always black. A huge percentage of the isolated leopards in Java are black, too. And most captive black leopards derive from these southeast Asian populations. There are some black leopards in Africa, especially in the Kenyan Highlands, which are about the only temperate place where black leopards can be found.
It is theoretically possible for a black leopard to survive in the marine temperate climate of Great Britain, but it is a stretch to think that leopard from tropical population could survive in Southern Ontario.
The greatest likelihood is that this cat is a domestic cat, but the second greatest likelihood is that it is a black cougar, the first of its kind documented on this continent. There have always been reports of black cougars. The skin of one was described in 1960. The cat was killed in Colorado, but the skin has been lost to time. A black cougar was supposedly killed in Costa Rica, which is also in North America, but it may have been a misidentified jaguarundi, which are the cougar’s closest relatives but are much smaller.
I think there is almost no chance of this animal being a jaguar or a leopard.
And until someone gives me some scale for this image, the best assumption is that it is a domestic cat.
And if it’s big, it’s very likely a black cougar, a phase that hasn’t been fully documented in North America before.
I think Rosatte’s assumptions are way off here. A cougar can survive in Ontario. A tropical leopard or a South American jaguar would have a very hard time surviving there. The only black leopards that are found in temperate areas are not the primary source for captive black leopards, and no black jaguar has been confirmed outside of South America.
So if this is a big cat, it has to be a black cougar, regardless of whether one has been spotted in North America before or not.
But my money is on it being a domestic cat.
Unless its something escaped from someones private zoo…
Maybe it’s one of those black silhouette cutouts like people put in their yards for decoration! I’ve seen a store that has just about every kind of animal imaginable available as one of those, most are life sized, too. I can’t really figure out why there is such a lack of detail to the cat when there are clear details/shadowing in the foreground grass, and even clear enough shadowing in the background. Is the cat walking away from the the camera? At that angle, I can see how someone could say it’s a jaguar. At that angle, the head looks really massive compared to the body. But still, I wouldn’t rule out a large cougar. As per whether a black cougar could actually exist, there are a lot of reports of large black cats throughout North America for centuries, and a lot of people here in PA spin yarns about the black panthers that “haunted” the state in the past. There are also supposedly some black cougars that exist in captivity (so I’ve been told by someone who claims to have had at least 3 of them, but I do not know firsthand). I think that it is very likely melanism occurs in cougars, if for no other reason than because no one has shown that it can’t occur. I mean, come on – there were white jaguars born in a zoo recently (thanks for alerting me to that!). Are there probably any white jaguars roaming around in the wild? No, probably not. But could there be? Apparently, yes, because here we have cubs born in a zoo. Does that mean that they could survive in the wild? No, but it doesn’t mean they could not survive in the wild, either. White jaguars, it would seem, should be more unlikely than black cougars, simply because evolution should have culled the genes for white individuals. But here we are. White jaguars. So why not black cougars? There certainly wouldn’t be the same selective pressures on black cougars as there are on white jaguars, so I think it seems plausible for black cougars to be roaming around North America. Maybe we don’t have any documentation of them before now because they are harder to see and therefore more elusive. Just a thought. :)
I’m sure this is just a black cougar. It’s a genetic anomaly that pops up from time to time and isn’t as rare as you might think. In the late 1980’s I spotted a black cougar in rural Clark County, Washington State, USA. It looked exactly like this one.
How neat. I grew up in that region. Guelph was only just over an hour away from my hometown.
It’s not warm by any standards, but being near the great lakes, the region stays pretty mild in the winter. We just get lots of lake effect snow.
http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/CAXX0181
I must agree with you about scale. I have a black cat, Minet, who looks very much like a mini jaguar. He’s very elongated with a slight swayback and high rear. I’m sure if I shot a grainy photo of him with his head down, and ears back like the photo above; you would be hard pressed to guess he was just a domestic kitty.
I don’t imagine a jaguar could survie in the winter in Canada.. but the best chance it would have would be in the golden horseshoe! Plus, stranger things have happened. =D
I don’t think one could survive in any place that had a real winter.
It is very unlikely that cougars could make a home in Guelph and surrounding Wellington county. Although this whole region has lots of conservation parks, it is also within the most densely populated region of Ontario. Guelph itself has a university, which has the best recognized agriculture and wildlife sciences programs. Therefore, more authentic words would have come from them.
However, wild turkey has made a comeback in the region due to plethora of conservation parks, such as Elora Gorge, Rockwood Conservation Area, etc. along its major rivers.
All of southern Ontario’s trails and forests are hiked and trekked by thousands of residents every year. No one has ever reported encountering a black cat that large so as to suspect it being a black cougar.
It is also true that this and the neighbouring counties have a number of private zoos and that a black panther or a Jaguar could escape from one of those.
Let me also mention that I spend lot of my time in VA and NC and at least in NC there are many reported sightings of cougars, although the management of Grandfather Mountain Sanctuary doubts the presence of wild cougars in that state :-)
Cougars actually live in Los Angeles.
But then perhaps resident on LA are familiar with them. If someone sights such an animal as a black cougar in southern Ontario, it won’t be a tabloid news.
Sorry! I meant residents of LA.
I don’t buy that it’s a cougar (black, or any other colour). The head is too big, even in silhouette and angled like that. I agree with you it’s likely a domestic cat, but by a very long stretch of the imagination it could be an escaped exotic animal. (I base this on a real anecdote — some colleagues in a rural area kept getting complaints from a fellow that his neighbor’s “big cat” was charging his kids and his dog, etc. and that they were scared to go by the yard. After the third complaint our guys rolled up with a snare pole and a skunk-sized carrier, actually intending to give the owner a stern talking to… and found the neighbor had an illegally kept adolescent tiger chained to his deck. If it had escaped no one would have believed the “tiger running loose” sightings either. Everyone would have assumed it was a mis-identified cougar, and/or that the witnesses were on drugs.)
I can’t tell if the animal is walking away from the camera or if it is parallel to the camera with it’s head held lower than its body, looking toward the camera. I think it’s walking away from the camera, so we should be able to see some of the jawline, which if it were a jaguar, would be diagnostic. Did Rick Rosatte mention thinking it was a domestic cat? If not, it may be because he has either other animals photographed from the same relative distance on that cameratrap to give him a sense of size. I would hope that someone who is gathering and presenting pretty good research indicating cougars are in Ontario would be able to rule out domestic cats on a camera trap. So perhaps he knows that this cat is too big to be a domestic cat.
I wouldn’t say that a black jaguar CAN’T survive in anyplace with a winter, so long as they have access to food, water, and some kind of shelter. There are many zoos and reserves that have black jaguars that keep them outdoors year-round. Some are nice and have the resources to provide heated rocks or other structures for the cats, but many can’t, and don’t, and the jaguars (and black leopards, for that matter) don’t seem to have any problems with the cold. I would imagine that an escaped Jaguar’s biggest challenge in winter would be finding water, but they may be able to do it, and if so, I would think they would make a go of it. However, do we know when this picture was taken? If it was taken last summer or fall, or even within the last month, maybe the winter survival question is moot anyway. And if a jaguar was going to survive a winter in Ontario, this would have been the winter to do it, apparently, since the weather across the continent was much milder than in winters past.
I also think it’s unwise to rule out a black cougar because no one else has seen one. Has anyone else seen a black jaguar in that area? Again, I’m assuming that Rick Rosatte has some way of ruling out a black domestic cat, such as having pictures of other animals from the same camera trap that give some sense of size to this particular animal. Big cats seem to have an almost supernatural ability to remain hidden from people, so human populations and/or number of hikers in an area don’t necessarily mean that a big cat won’t at least pass through undetected. A cougar killed by a vehicle just outside New York City was found to have been wild born in South Dakota, and it had trekked east until it met its end on a highway. It had been implicated in only one other sighting – in Connecticut – so cougars can traverse highly populated areas, and long distances, without much detection. They may not prefer to be around people, but the presence of people does not necessarily prevent, or really deter, them from going about their business. As for whether black cougars exist in the wild, that’s anybody’s guess. I wouldn’t bet against it, that’s for sure.
I’m with you. A large animal can survive in S Ontario if it can find shelter from wind. Same principle that allows dogs to be kept in unheated kennels.
We love weird colors. Had it been possible to breed a black cougar, we’d have done it a long time ago. The black cougar argument – that they exist – is worldwide and yet – nothing by way of proof. Black jags and leopards, on the other hand, are commonly bred and kept.
Re the pussy cat-no-item-for-scale idea, this is a question. It seems to me that the domestic cat has tiny paws and teeth relative to the size of the animal. As though it is designed to kill critters much smaller than itself. To me, this has 2 implications. One is that this picture is not of a domestic cat. The other is that the belief that the domestic cat can grow to large size is not true. Any ideas, anyone?
Kathy – I can’t verify it, but I’ve been told that there are “black” cougars in captivity. Again, I have no proof, but that information comes from a person who has spent many years working with wildlife – both in captivity and in the wild – and has kept many exotic animals over the years (including the alleged “black” cougars). According to this person, they are not really a true black; rather a much darker gray than what one would typically see in the wild, and at least one that he had was for all intent and purposes, black. I’m not vouching for the authenticity of this claim, I’m just putting it out there that SUPPOSEDLY (key word) private collectors are breeding for the black color.
I think you may be correct about the paw/teeth to body size ratio for domestic cats; although I really wouldn’t know how it compares to wild small cats. I keep thinking in this picture that the cat is looking at the camera, and if so, it is holding its ears flat, and that would enable us to see the white spot. This won’t necessarily give an indication of species, but since most domestic cat breeds don’t have white spots on the backs of their ears, it would help to rule out domestic cat. I still think we should trust Rick Rosatte in so much as he never proposed domestic cat as an option, which leads me to believe he has some way of judging the scale (such as having pictures from the same trail camera of other animals of known relative height). He ruled that this is a big cat, concluding that it is a jaguar or leopard escapee because there are no known black cougars in North America (he makes a point of saying “in North America” – does this mean that there are black cougars in South America?). I don’t think that is a good reason to rule out a black cougar. The closest relative to a cougar is a Jaguarundi, which comes in two distinct color phases: red and grey (and there is variability within color phases). Some of the grey phased cats are dark enough to be called black. I could see the same occuring in courgars, especially since North American cougars have a tendency to be grey (varying from slate grey through yellow buff to brownish red). Is it not possible for one to have a coat dark enough to be considered black in certain light (or in apparently grainy trailcam photos)? I think that Mr. Rosatte should have done a little more digging into this particular cat to determine species before dismissing outright. But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Scottie has pulled a belated April fool on us :-)
I realize this is an old post – but I have seen a black jaguar, or whatever that is. Exactly that. In Atlantic Canada, in the dense brush. They are surreal and big. I know many others who have seen it, hunters mainly. They are an extremely intuitive apex predator with a long lifespan. It doesn’t matter if people on the internet buy it or not, because these are a real and physical part of our ecosystem. Sometimes, seeing truly is believing. Before understanding, must come acceptance.
Black jaguars have never been confirmed north of the Panama.
All North American jaguars have been spotted.
I have no idea what you saw, but the chances of it being a black, native jaguar are very low.
I was on highway 61 in Ontario, not far over the border from the U.S. on Monday, July 23, 2012 somewhat before noon ET – a bright sunny day, and I saw a very large black cat that looked like a black cougar run across the road right in front of the pick up truck in front of me. We both pulled over, but didn’t see it again, although I could see movement in the tall grass on the side of the road. It wasn’t a large dog, a bear or a wolf. It had short black fur – not gray and it moved like a cat, bounding effortlessly across the road, east to west. I know cougars aren’t black and I know jaguars don’t live this far north. But it was a very big black muscular animal that moved like a cat.
My friend recently took a picture of a Cat in a tree in Washington state . She said she was about 40 yards away and through a spotting scope saw this large cat sleeping in a tree about 25 feet off the ground . She said the cat was about the size of my border collie who is about 30 pounds. This cat looks just like a cougar except its jet black. Called DNR and they said it was a domestic cat..and left. . I’m incredibly intrigued by this..