With the mythology of Black Dogs (and for that matter my earlier work into the origins of the Pagan revival) the research methodology is essentially about historical analysis based on archival research and interviews, anthropology and folklore. Whilst there are plenty of people who claim experience strange phenomenon and have many sightings of Black Dogs and the like the basis of the argument is really about the stories which are rich in folklore and heritage. In essence, people have the ability to run the line of whether or not a claim or experience is empirically true the stories themselves are important culturally and they have a deep resonance with the psyche of the community and the context in which they occur. This parallels many religious traditions of supernaturalism where the cultural significance of the experience and its symbolism far outweighs its scientific veracity in the public mind. To a large extent this is reflected in the nature of the stories themselves which are presented to you as, in effect, ghost stories or parables rooted deeply in folklore, history and local culture. They fulfil an important social and cultural role, like religious traditions such as Christian or Pagan origin myths and stories, and thus it is relatively easy to eschew the empirical questions and focus on the cultural and historic legacy.
This is considerably more difficult in the mythology of Big Cats. We don’t have old folk songs, place names and legends of Big Cats like the British do of Black Dogs (for that matter 19th century Australia had its share of Black Dog Legends). Whilst there is a clear legacy and common themes in re-enchanting the bush, links to other stories of trauma such as that of presumed extinction of the Thylacine, local folklore, origins myths and the like at base the tradition is much more based on interpretations of empirical data and evidence. In particular there is the problem raised by a wealth of secondary evidence that is very suggestive but a dearth of primary evidence that would conclusively resolve the issue. Big Cat researcher Tony Healy often remarks in his books on Australian mystery animals that the wealth of secondary information such as sightings, footprints, dead stock, faeces and the like would suggest that they would have to exist yet the absence of complete comprehensive proof (such as road kills, bodies in bush fires, captured animals and the like) would suggest that they can not exist either. The other side of the coin is that a common issue I have heard raised by researchers into Big Cat’s is that their work is limited by the lack of funding, integrated support for researchers and access to facilities which works against providing conclusive evidence suitable for persuading the skeptics. Indeed, as cryptozoologist Paul Cropper noted at the 2001 “Myth and Monsters” conference,
Most mystery animal research in Australia has been undertaken by amateurs or individuals.
Government and scientific interest has been sporadic, limited in time and scope and generally produced nothing.
Most individuals engaged in research are opinionated, rarely share data and don’t generally function well in groups. AYR and ARFRA are exceptions.
There has been no real accumulation of information. Most researchers die (well actually they all do) and their learnings die with them.
Some of these problems relate to complaints I have heard time and time again such as a lack of access to reliable DNA testing and a tendency for research labs, eager to avoid being associated with fringe areas of research, to label all scat as dog. A particularly prominent example of this being a test where researcher Mike Williams sent Panther and Puma faeces from Taronga Park Zoo for forensic analysis to an Australian research institution which came back as “Probably dog”. Private researchers are not the only ones with this problem as it also plagued the 1977 large scale study of Puma’s in the Grampians in Victoria by Deakin University. These problems led to divisions where the research groups divided into believer and skeptic camps which actively tried to sabotage each others research and risked throwing the validity of the study into doubt. In a particular example one researcher fabricated Puma prints as a way of discrediting another team she perceived as too credulous leading to a degree of acrimony amongst team members which worked to sabotage the validity of the project.
There are other odd lines of research emerging in my studies so far such as the fact that in Australia, like many other nations, we have a history of attributing oddly killed stock to a wide variety of remarkable causes. One particular model was that of dead stock and wildlife attributed to the actions of Satanic or Pagan cults which were part of a wide spread moral panic of Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s. Similar patterns of dead stock missing organs, removed genitalia, bored out rectums and the like were also attributed to UFOs under the heading of cattle mutilation. For that matter these kinds of finds have been used to attack various examples of Australian native fauna such as Wedge tailed Eagles, Dingos and Thylacines in the 19th century leading to an assault on native wildlife up until recent times.
The thing is these stories gain weight as they travel via folklore and start to create their own momentum irrespective of large scale FBI studies which found the results of this kind of phenomena to be that of an animal which has been worked over by several kinds of scavengers leaving a rather bizarre looking corpse. There is also a pattern of dead stock attributed to Big Cats (and for that matter Thylacines in Tasmania and Victoria) which have their own distinct patterns attributed to them. For example an animal recently dead with selective feeding on one night followed by a picked clean skeleton with fleece or skin peeled back with canine holes along an edge in one piece.. That being said, I find my lack of background in evaluating this sort of thing terribly limiting and I can see, from the historical record, problems with attributing causation to dead animals alone particularly when a body may show the marks of several scavengers leaving quite bizarre looking corpses.
Another line of evidence is that of footprints. Australia is tricky in that regard in that our terrain is poor ground for footprints and often many prints can be tied together to create odd results. As Big Cats researcher Rebecca Lang put it to me,
Our terrain largely does not lend itself to retaining great prints for casting - especially in areas such as where I live, where the 'soil' is sandy, shallow and interrupted by lots of rock and vegetation. Add to that the fact a lot of people are crap at casting, or cast 'too late' i.e. when the track has been exposed to significant weathering, AND some casts are actually crappy composites of marsupial tracks that aren't cat at all (not everyone - even keen amateur 'big cat hunters' - can discern what animal makes what track). I think you'll find that will explain the diversity of tracks being presented as 'proof'.
The other side is of course sightings, of which they are many but again difficult to confirm. Memory plays a major role as our perceptions of experiences change and we constantly reshape our memory of experiences in light of new information yet we tend to presume it is somehow permanent like a television image. I saw something a lot like a Panther once on the road from Ballarat to Geelong near Anakie. It certainly looked like a big black panther/puma on the road in the headlights of the car. It looked at the car and I saw a flash of yellow eyes reflected in the headlights and it slinked across the road close to the ground with a long with animated tail swishing in the air behind it. Now the memory seems real enough but I can’t be sure of it. I was driving at 2 in the morning was I seeing things in a hypnogogic state of some kind? Was it mistaken identity that looked cat like in the shadows of the headlights and trees? Was it something else that I retrospectively reshaped in my memory without being conscious of it? It is really hard to tell with memory and the act of reflecting on it and talking about it changes the nature of the memory itself. We then also have to deal with the legacy of created and false memories such as those from the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s where stories became constructed by cult investigators and imprinted in the mind of people being interviewed, especially when dubious practices like regressive hypnosis became involved. Then again we have here a wealth of sightings by, often quite skilled investigators like police officers, military personnel and forest rangers which, despite the limitations of memory of its own have a certain weight. This inevitably becomes tied to photographic and film evidence, of which there are again many examples, but it is hard to get shots that are clear and very hard to get a sense of perspective. On the other side you have people who, well simply, tell fibs and there can be a wide range of reasons for that. Yet that being said the sheer number of sightings and patterns of stories and how they develop suggests against the idea that they are all simply fabrications, although they certainly do occur, like hoaxes.
On the historical front there are numerous stories, of which I have discussed in earlier blogs, where people have attempted to hang these phenomena on plausible sounding origin myths such as the Acclimatization Society, US military personnel and others. All I can say, as a historian who has been going through the papers and records relating to these myths, is that while the claims relating to Acclimatization Society and US Military personal become increasingly dubious when linked to the historical record, the 19th century lacks no shortage of places where Big Cats could be introduced. There were people selling exotic animals for pets at the docks across Australia. There were numerous circus escapees of which we only hear about the ones in urban areas where dangerous animals were mostly hunted and recaptured or shot. There were also private menageries which were sold in auction and we only have partial data about where the animals ended up and even those were often shifted between private collections all largely unregulated. Even this century, where there has been a reasonable effort at regulating introduced species, there have been numerous Wildlife Park and circus escapees and deliberate releasing of inconvenient exotic pets of all kinds of exotic animals. At the least there was a Puma shot in St Arnaud in 1924, a Puma shot at Woodend in 1961 and a Lioness shot in 1985 at Broken Hill. Similarly a pygmy hippopotamus released from a wilflife park was shot in the Northern Territory in 2009 by hunter who had mistaken it for a feral pig in the water. A thought which has often occurred to me going over the historic record is that we are lucky in Australia not to be overwhelmed with all kinds of exotic introduced species, which in a sense we are with camels, rabbits, foxes, water buffalo, deer, feral pigs, goats and a host of other animals. Short of it is that if there are introduced big cats here there is no shortage of potential means by which they could have been introduced and that there is nothing at all implausible about their introduction.
So where am I at the moment in research? Given the centrality of certain artefacts (photographs, dead stock/wildlife, prints and sightings) as vehicles for legitimating the folklore and stories of Big Cats I simply have to get into the science of it which requires a massive crash course in things like veterinary science, tracking and environmental science or to team up with people who do have those skills. I am currently setting up networks with people from those fields to get some opinion in these areas. Secondly, whilst there is an agreement amongst people researching Big Cats in Australia that something is out there which fits the traits ascribed to it there is no agreement on what it is. I have come across stories ranging from oversized feral cats, to Pumas, to melanistic Leopards to even surviving examples of Thylacoleo Carnifexes. These stories will be the subject of my next entry. Thirdly there is an apparent pattern to the evidence whereby there is an enormous prevalence of secondary evidence grouped together which is very suggestive but any one portion becomes woefully inadequate as proof on its own. This then raises questions about issues like confirmation bias and group think but I am simply not qualified to make these sorts of judgements as they stand and need to develop substantive new skills or collaborate with people who do. Finally, I need to network more with people doing the research in the field and get a more developed understand of the methods and interpretive structure at play.
