Yep. 9-10 mos ago I heard a sound like a child yelling or something around midnight so I went out on the back deck to listen. My fiancee’ went to look out the front door window and he saw 2 juvenile black panthers waltzing down the the street right in front of our house. I guess they were calling out to Mom who was probably hunting down in the greenbelt behind our neighborhood.
25 years ago we lived in Western Washington State. Our land backed up to 1000 acres of State forest. I loved to wander the deer trails behind our house looking at the native flora in the woods and would take my 2 dogs and 2 cats along for the walk. I discovered a perpetually marshy place at the back of our land and went to inspect it. My dogs and my cats refused to come with me. The dogs stood there and barked, while the cats scampered up a tree.
My inspection of the marshy area revealed some huge pawprints. I showed them to my husband, and he said they were nothing to worry about — they were just from a dog who had sunken in the mud, making his paw prints look larger than normal.
Fast forward 5 years. We moved away, and our house in the woods was sold to the DNR for a ranger station. We went back to have a look to see what they had done with the property and found (to my dismay) signs posted in what was formerly my pasture mapping the trails on the land and warning hikers to “Beware of Panthers!”
Lesson: Listen to your cats and dogs!