Najakcharmer
Posts: 2121
Joined: 5/3/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DarkWriter Sorry, it was not an animal. I do know the difference. It's entirely possible you do, especially if you have extensive wildlife or biology background, but I would not be able to rule it out from here. I have done many years worth of nuisance wildlife removal and relocation, and the animal I actually trap and move is normally reported even by people who are trained observers (eg, policemen, sheriffs and EMS) as at least 150% of its actual size (usually more) and very rarely of the correct species. I only ever had a wild animal under-reported in size once in all the years I've been trapping, and that was by a zookeeper. Every other case without exception was over-reported in size and very often incorrectly reported by species, by sane and sober adult witnesses who all swear they can make accurate identifications. We're talking about hundreds of cases where the nuisance animal's actual size and weight was taken after live capture. I doubt any of these individuals were consciously lying; they all believed their stories, sometimes even in the face of being shown the live animal that was unquestionably the source of their nuisance report. There is a pretty clear phenomenon going on here that makes a lot of sense to me; basically it's incredibly easy and possibly even pre-programmed in the Homo sapiens brain to perceive a suddenly appearing wild animal as much larger and more threatening than it actually is. The only thing that seems to defuse this mechanism is extensive personal or professional experience with the same or similar species. So I don't know what you experienced, but based on some years of history in comparing eyewitness reports of nuisance wildlife encounters with the actual live animal, I would not be able to rule out an urban wildlife encounter since the description does match.
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