Big cat blamed for killing pigs near Bloomington, Indiana

Big cat blamed for killing pigs near Bloomington, Indiana

Associated Press
WHITEHALL, Ind. — An Owen County woman said she watched a big, black panther-like cat attack a small pig on her property, and she and her husband later found six other pigs mauled.


The sighting is the latest by Indiana residents who say they have seen large cats that are not supposed to exist in the state.
Sherry Rodman said she saw the animal Jan. 31 while preparing for work at Indiana University in Bloomington, about nine miles away.

She noticed her German shepherd running around outside a pen where the pigs were kept and went back in the house to get a flashlight. As she headed toward the pen, she said she saw a black cat larger than the dog, holding a small pig in its mouth. The animal dropped the pig and ran away, she said.

The cat was “long and slinky” and coal black, she said.

She and her husband, Tony, later found six pigs in the pen fatally mauled. The seventh pig later died.

The couple didn’t call authorities.

“It wouldn’t do no good,” said Tony Rodman.

Rodman, who said he saw a similar cat three years ago in Kentucky, said he would shoot the animal if he saw it again.

Bloomington area residents for years have reported seeing large cougar-like cats, black or otherwise.

“I’ve been hearing about it for a year or so,” said Rose Bastin, a neighbor of the Rodmans who runs a diner in Hendricksville. “Panthers, mainly. You hear of people seeing it. It’s not really strange to hear that. “You never know what to make of it.”

Department of Natural Resources officers are skeptical of such reports, though they don’t deny the possibility that mountain lions may exist in Indiana.

“We would never say that they’re not out there,” Angie Goldman, conservation officer for Monroe County, said today. But DNR officials believe any such cats are likely to be exotic pets that have been turned loose or escaped, not native animals.

And black mountain lions do not exist, according to Mark Dowling, co-founder and director of the Concord, Mass.-based Cougar Network, which tracks evidence of the animal’s spread east of the Rocky Mountains.

“A lot of people want to believe in these things,” said Dowling, but the group has not found any authenticated records of a black cougar.

Ordinary cougars, however, have been making a comeback in recent decades, he said.


The generally reclusive animals were hunted to near extinction in most of the Midwest by the early 1900s. But cougars have been confirmed in Missouri and Illinois. A deer hunter found a dead mountain lion in northwest Illinois in December 2004.

“Every year, there’s more and more of these showing up in the Midwest,” he said.



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