It is unusual for a state department to become involved like this in taking the time and trouble to prove that a citizen of the state has got it wrong when they say they have seen a mountain lion.
In this instance, a woman made a video of a cat walking along the top of a cliff face. She claimed that the cat was a mountain lion. The Missouri Department of Conservation used cutouts as a size comparison as you can see from the photographs below.
They placed the cutouts in the exact location where the video was made. It becomes immediately apparent that the cat that the lady saw was a domestic cat with similar colouring to a mountain lion (puma).
As I said, it is highly unusual for a State Department to take the time and trouble to prove a person wrong. I have to say that, although the effort is welcome, you can tell that it is not a mountain lion by the height of the grass that the cat walks through. The cat is more or less masked by the grass which clearly indicates that this could not be a mountain lion.
The mountain lion is the fourth-largest cat on the planet, behind the Jaguar and just in front of the leopard. It is therefore much larger than the domestic cat which I presume is something that everybody knows. However, the puma is much smaller than the jaguar as you can see if you click on this link which takes you to a comparison of weights and sizes of the wild cat species.
SOME MORE ON SIGHTINGS…
