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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2958 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 22, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This reminds me of the mountain lion in the Eastern US.

The official stance from the federal and state wildlife agencies is that, excluding a small relict population in Florida, the mountain lion has been extirpated from the East Coast and has been for decades.

Despite this, local sightings persist and at least two have been struck by cars in the last twenty years. I have a relative who claims that one was hunting his sheep. He called the local game commission who told him that it didn't exist and that shooting it would be against the law. He claims to have taken a shot at it and winged it, and nothing has hunted his sheep since.

He's also an inveterate story-teller and drunk, so take that with a grain of salt.

range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.

I remember stories about 30+ pound black feral housecats in the outback. Is this related?

He called the local game commission who told him that it didn't exist and that shooting it would be against the law.

I've received similar admonitions from government on other matters.

I've seen a number of stories on the internet where someone states they found mountain lions outside the accepted range and the response from the government is "nope but actually yes it's just rare and I don't want to deal with the paperwork."

I can't say for sure if this is a meme or refection of reality.

I mean, reliability level of "some dude on the internet" but, I can tell you I saw a mountain lion about 20 feet from me hiking in Central VA last year. It was slinking up a not-human-navigable trail on a hillside, stopped, looked at me. I looked at it. It walked away.

I'm not positive because the light was bad, but I'm pretty sure I've seen one near Blacksburg a while back. It was either a mountain lion or the biggest bobcat I've ever seen. I don't want to completely rule out the latter, but it seems unlikely to me.

I was under the impression that the presence of mountain lions in the Eastern US was indeed rare but also pretty much an open secret these days. Two people that I've known from that neck of the woods have separately shared with me that they saw mountain lions in various parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they were trustworthy folks. When I did a little digging I ran straight into the whole, "they just have a large range," cope, which, while true, doesn't exactly satisfy when the sightings are still too numerous and much too far away from their known habitats.

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