Found Half a Fox in the Bush, Any Panthers Out There?

Was out prospecting a few days ago and came across a fox that looked like it had been torn in half about mid section which was tattered. The fox had only its chest, front legs and head left.
Went back the next day to take a photo and only the head was left.
Took the dog for a walk a day later to have a look and the head was gone.
An old mate told me years ago that nothing would eat a fox, I used to skin them for tanning and they do have a horrible stink. I thought it might have been dogs pulling at it but their was no damage on the front part of the body.
Did they ever get that panther, anyone?????
Or what the hell else could it be?

My Grandfather told me that he knew some Italian migrants* who ate foxes during the great depression.

Thylacine??



*The fact that they ate foxes during the great depression says something about how hungry they were, rather than anything about their cultural background.

could be an eagle. They'll eat anything. Vengeful bunnies with a bad attitude!!!

please!, not the great cat debate again, you will have them coming out of the woodwork there has never been any conclusive proof brought forward, only guesswork and old wives tales, there are no big cats other than a few oversized wild moggys out there, which by the way have no place in the Australian ecology and should be hunted to extinction as the murderous wildlife plague that they are.

Wayne.

True,not too many animals will eat a fox unless they are starving. Foxes do have a stank that rivals anything I have ever smelled.
Ever noticed how even road kill foxes just tend to dry out on the side of the road rather than be dragged off and consumed?
Big Cats....well those of us who have seen them can consider ourselves lucky.....or maybe we are just more observant than some

Gus wrote:True,not too many animals will eat a fox unless they are starving. Foxes do have a stank that rivals anything I have ever smelled.
Ever noticed how even road kill foxes just tend to dry out on the side of the road rather than be dragged off and consumed?
Big Cats....well those of us who have seen them can consider ourselves lucky.....or maybe we are just more observant than some

Hey mate remember that stew I made
When we were camped at that secret location
That had a real garlic smell
That was to hide the fox

All cats are stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTasT5h0LEg&feature=player_detailpage

Has anyone ever encountered a large Koala up near the side of a creek bank,bottom half of the koala completely severed and missing,with the rest of its fur skinned all the way off its flesh,cleanly back up to its neck.Whilst 5 meters further down the same creek a 5 foot + Brown snake with its head crushed back to its neck by some form of tooth marks? Now I'm not about to say what it might've been for I simply don't know.One thing I will say though,seeing what looked like a couple of padded clawed foot prints the size of my palm embedded on the softer mud clay dirt near by,does make one seriously think? By the way,this encounter was around the district of Castlemain Vic.

Cheers kon61.

The half fox I found was south of Smythesdale, might have come out of the Enfield State Forest.
Will be taking a gun next time I'm out.
Kon61, how long ago was this Koala mutilation?
cheers Tezz

kon61 wrote:
Has anyone ever encountered a large Koala up near the side of a creek bank,bottom half of the koala completely severed and missing,with the rest of its fur skinned all the way off its flesh,cleanly back up to its neck.Whilst 5 meters further down the same creek a 5 foot + Brown snake with its head crushed back to its neck by some form of tooth marks? Now I'm not about to say what it might've been for I simply don't know.One thing I will say though,seeing what looked like a couple of padded clawed foot prints the size of my palm embedded on the softer mud clay dirt near by,does make one seriously think? By the way,this encounter was around the district of Castlemain Vic.

Cheers kon61.

I can't explain your brown snake Mr Kon61. But that koala sounds to me to be the victim of one Powerful Owl, I don't know if they habitat that far south but i'm pretty sure they're down the entire eastern side of australia so probably. Don't let the Owl part of their name fool you, they are pretty massive.
Don't forget if you were thinking of a big cat the prints wouldn't be clawed, cats don't walk around with their claws out. Dog prints.

Digginerup wrote:please!, not the great cat debate again, you will have them coming out of the woodwork there has never been any conclusive proof brought forward, only guesswork and old wives tales, .

Wayne.

Hmmmmm sound a bit like the stories written in a book called a bible No conclusive proof and lots of stories there too....................but geez how many people believe in it ehh?

Posted by Gus; Big Cats....well those of us who have seen them can consider ourselves lucky.....or maybe we are just more observant than some Wink

Yep I'm with you there Gus. I'm an observant believer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BelReWvzF6o
Watch this video, some of it could be fake, hard to say
In 1981 around lake Buloke in Vic I did see a huge grey cat the size of a full grown fox in 3 feet of dry grass about 20 metres away, had a shot at it, swore I hit it but it vanished.
I think I would be more worried about wild dogs in the bush as I had a frightening experience with one 5 years ago in the back blocks behind Coffs Harbour and with no weapon to protect myself.
cheers Tezz

Jc84,My mistake was not taking a couple of clear pictures of the prints with maybe a dollar coin next to them,put them up on this forum and maybe some member here might be able to explain what we're looking at.If it were dog prints,I'd hate to encounter the size of this beast,face to face. I've seen several an odd owl fly past our bright camp lights, from time to time,but the size of its body no bigger than 15 inches or so. I've skinned several a wild goat,pig,the odd deer and even sheep for Easter celebrations,but nothing comes close to this Koala being surgically skinned clean all the way back to its neck.Birds of prey tend to pluck fur and feather off a dead carcass,the animal or bird as you say to be,able to do this to a large and I mean large Koala,had to have the power of a silver back gorilla.I'm not going to make a fool out of myself in saying what I believe it to be,for to me only clearly seeing is believing. Tezz the encounter of the carcasses in question,was late November 2012.


Cheers kon61.

kon61 wrote:

Jc84,My mistake was not taking a couple of clear pictures of the prints with maybe a dollar coin next to them,put them up on this forum and maybe some member here might be able to explain what we're looking at.If it were dog prints,I'd hate to encounter the size of this beast,face to face. I've seen several an odd owl fly past our bright camp lights, from time to time,but the size of its body no bigger than 15 inches or so. I've skinned several a wild goat,pig,the odd deer and even sheep for Easter celebrations,but nothing comes close to this Koala being surgically skinned clean all the way back to its neck.Birds of prey tend to pluck fur and feather off a dead carcass,the animal or bird as you say to be,able to do this to a large and I mean large Koala,had to have the power of a silver back gorilla.I'm not going to make a fool out of myself in saying what I believe it to be,for to me only clearly seeing is believing. Tezz the encounter of the carcasses in question,was late November 2012.


Cheers kon61.

So what your saying is you believe this koala was attacked and skinned by a surgically trained big cat? or a rogue member of the surgical community, Hmmmm, the plot thickens

Yep.

kon61.

Watch out, I'm coming to get ya!

G'day Tezz,
Interesting situation. I have come across something like this before, but, this was in a previous incarnation when I ran a goat dairy in the early eighties, when we diversified into having a small flock (30 head) of cashmere goats running with the Dairy goats...
We'd just had our spring drop of Kids and they were about 2 weeks old. we would shed the dairy goats overnight and paddock them in the morning, leaving the cashmere's out, mainly because they were tougher and by shedding the dairy goats, there was a better feed to milk conversion ratio. I was walking through the paddocks checking leaf growth on the pastures ( 3 leaf time to rotate, 5 leaf, time to graze it) when I came across one of the cashmere kids carcasses that had been eaten from the back hocks, up to it's diaphragm. I asked around a few of the other goat people in the area about this, because, though it had been eaten from hock to the ribs, the hide was intact, with a 3 inch opening just between it's back legs...
One old fellow reckoned that it was a fox, and He'd seen it a few times before, so, what comes to my mind is, would a fox eat another fox as this technique seems to be consistent with fox kills...Any ideas?

Don't know if you have feral pigs down in Victoria but up here in Qld thay will eat any meat, including their own.

Pigs here in the Central West will kill a lamb and only leave the skin (neatly turned inside out and without a scrap of blood or meat on it) sometime they will leave the feet on and sometime a head.... but the rest Gone - clean as a whistle. A large mob of Kites will also strip a roo carcass in a day. Panthers Nah! not a chance, black feral cats look pretty big after a few rums

John

G'day

I don't know about the terrestrial critters but I've seen a few things at sea that made me shudder. Used to get alot of tuna eaten by sharks that would eventually hook themselves somewhere down the line, so it's not uncommon to get a run of tuna heads and shortly after the culprit responsible (mostly makos, bronzies and tigers). One particular time I got back a run of big heads (60-80kg fish) and then the 500kg tiger who'd eaten my fish. Only problem was the tiger had been swallowed tail first and bitten in half with the curve of the bite from the top of the dorsal fin and right through the body We tied to estimate the size of an animal that could do this and even the biggest white shark wouldn't have come close.
Maybe Megaladon is not extinct

cheers

Chimpy

kon61 wrote:
Has anyone ever encountered a large Koala up near the side of a creek bank,bottom half of the koala completely severed and missing,with the rest of its fur skinned all the way off its flesh,cleanly back up to its neck.Whilst 5 meters further down the same creek a 5 foot + Brown snake with its head crushed back to its neck by some form of tooth marks? Now I'm not about to say what it might've been for I simply don't know.One thing I will say though,seeing what looked like a couple of padded clawed foot prints the size of my palm embedded on the softer mud clay dirt near by,does make one seriously think? By the way,this encounter was around the district of Castlemain Vic.

Cheers kon61.

I hav't seen what you have described in castlemaine, but i have had a big cat encounter whilst prospecting there about 13 years ago near frystown which is only a stone throw down the road.
Not sure what sort of cat we were dealing with as we could not see it but down in a creekbed full of blackberries which we had entered some hours earlier that day following the track out that we traversed in through thick overburden near a huge drain almost back at the car, we were stopped dead in our tracks by a hair raising, blood curdling, repetitive, very deep and loud knarling coming out from behind thick overburden on the side of track, when we started trying to move forward again it became more intensified and louder, so we backed up turned around pi#sing and sh@t*ing down the backs of our legs and ran for mercy. This turned out to be one of the most ridiculous afternoons trying to relocate a new way back to the car albeit that once we got back around to the car we were back to back looking for this beast as it was right near the car we heard this.

In 2005 an old couple sighted what they claim was a panther just up the road near vaughan springs exert from the website below link included.
20061228 - Fryerstown (Vic) Sighting 2005 (Including Alice Springs) (Reported 28/12/06)
20061228 - Fryerstown (Vic) Sighting 2005 (Including Alice Springs) (Reported 28/12/06). as follows:

Back in October 2005 my wife and I were holidaying in Victoria, one Sunday afternoon we stopped by the roadside to take a photo of the old beehive site,this area is located between Fryerstown and Chewton,( not far from Vaughan Springs). We were setting up to take the picture when we noticed a big black animal near the side of the road,my wife the remarked " thats a big black cat" the animal moved into a gully then into a huge briar or prickle bush area.

You could see that the animal was cat like by its movement,"like a crouched creeping movement" then vanished into the briars. We could not believe what we had just seen.
On that particular day there had been a press release in the "herald sun" showing some guy who cliamed he had shot a large cat in the Gippsland area,and we thought that if we had reported the sighting we may have been deemed as "crack pots" trying to muscle in on the media junket. which was all about big cat siding.

I find it interesting though that a previus sighting had been reported from the Vaughan Springs area,which is only a few Ks from our sighting.

My wife and I live in Alice Springs where there have been several reports of large cats living in this arid area,general consensus is that these cats have been feral and have mutated into larger species over the years,sometime ago I found the remains of a cat which had been electrocuted at a Transformer site and its skeletal remains were quite large especially its head and at that time I thought the remains were too large to be a feral cat.

Graeme

Author / Witness - Graeme - Reported 28/12/06.

Hi Graeme, They are out there, but luckily most of them die off in the winter because they can't stand the cold because of a mutation that has made them all bald to cope with the heat, but rendered them susceptible to severe head colds.
This photo captured in Irishtown shows how clever they can be. They are learning to adapt by knitting themselves beanies to fend off the cold. Photo witnessed by shiraz 28/4/13

I knew this would happen! I told them so!!! noone would believe me!!,noone listened!!, this is what you get when knitting becomes accepted in society, where will it all end!!!. personally I blame the CWA.

Wayne.

The Black Panther X-Files:

http://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/australian_panther_mainpage.html

Digginerup wrote:I knew this would happen! I told them so!!! noone would believe me!!,noone listened!!, this is what you get when knitting becomes accepted in society, where will it all end!!!. personally I blame the CWA.

Wayne.

That would be the Cat Whisperers Association. Bunch of damn do-gooders.

Yeah thats them!.... lot to answer for.

Wayne.

mbasko wrote:The Black Panther X-Files:

http://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/australian_panther_mainpage.html

thanks very good link

I've posted the pic before, and I'm still not convinced that the paw print isn't a cat print. The lense cap is 62 mm across (2+ inches in the old school of measurement)

mungoman wrote:I've posted the pic before, and I'm still not convinced that the paw print isn't a cat print. The lense cap is 62 mm across (2+ inches in the old school of measurement)

Nice pic where did you take this one?

G'day Goldsak, I came across this in the Lake Mungo National Park...It'd been chasing a wallaby or a small roo and unfortunately I couldn't see any other cat prints to measure the distance, either way, it was a big bugger.

mungoman wrote:G'day Goldsak, I came across this in the Lake Mungo National Park...It'd been chasing a wallaby or a small roo and unfortunately I couldn't see any other cat prints to measure the distance, either way, it was a big bugger.

Sure is mate very nice discovery