Okay, here's what's going to happen with all this.
1) More chickens, sheep, dogs, etc. will get killed. Cat spoor will be found nearby.
2) Locals will go into a panic over the cats. "They're eating our dogs -- are we next?"
3) Local cops and farmers will go out hunting the cats. The felines will leave traces of their existence but will /never/ show themselves in front of men with guns.
4a) Either the whole thing dies down in a few weeks and the police denounce everything as 'misidentifications of normal English wildlife' OR
4b) Some trigger-happy sort shoots someone's mastiff and the police declare the case closed as the mastiff was obviously the 'panther'. Everyone will go back to normal until the next 'panther attack'.
Don't believe my prediction of the outcome? Go check out Clark and Coleman's 'Mysterious America' or Jerome Clark's 'Unexplained'. Both books have entire chapters devoted to the lore of 'phantom panthers', both in the UK and the US. For that matter, Charles Fort wrote about the exact same situations over a hundred years ago. It happens like this, every single time.
Okay, here's what's going to happen with all this.
1) More chickens, sheep, dogs, etc. will get killed. Cat spoor will be found nearby.
2) Locals will go into a panic over the cats. "They're eating our dogs -- are we next?"
3) Local cops and farmers will go out hunting the cats. The felines will leave traces of their existence but will /never/ show themselves in front of men with guns.
4a) Either the whole thing dies down in a few weeks and the police denounce everything as 'misidentifications of normal English wildlife' OR
4b) Some trigger-happy sort shoots someone's mastiff and the police declare the case closed as the mastiff was obviously the 'panther'. Everyone will go back to normal until the next 'panther attack'.
Don't believe my prediction of the outcome? Go check out Clark and Coleman's 'Mysterious America' or Jerome Clark's 'Unexplained'. Both books have entire chapters devoted to the lore of 'phantom panthers', both in the UK and the US. For that matter, Charles Fort wrote about the exact same situations over a hundred years ago. It happens like this, every single time.
Ardashir