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Mark Orr / Supplied
This enlarged photo shows the stocky cat that Mark Orr saw while riding a mountain bike.
A mountain biker in Hanmer Springs has become the latest person to spot what appears to be the elusive Canterbury black cat.
Christchurch osteopath Mark Orr, 25, said he was lifting his mountain bike over a fallen tree on the 780-meter Perseverance Bike Trail on Sunday when he spotted a big cat about 50 meters away.
“[It was] One hundred percent is not a dog, there’s no question about that, “Orr said.
“It was a cat, it was knee-high and much more robust than a normal cat.”
SUNDAY MORNING / RNZ
For more than 50 years, the presence of cougar-like feral cats on the South Island has been a hotly debated topic, but a Twizel DOC official remains skeptical.
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He said the cat walked the path they were riding “as if it were its owner.”
The incident was “a bit strange,” Orr said.
The sighting follows two others in September by possum hunter Jesse Feary.
Feary shot one of them: a wild cat that weighed 11 kilograms and was 1.05 m when stretched out.
JESSE FEARY
Jesse Feary isn’t going to hunt possums just after shooting what he thinks is a big cat.
Feary believed it was the baby of another large cat he had seen days earlier, which he calculated was twice the size of the one he shot.
The cat he shot weighed 4 kg more than the largest wild cat caught by the Department of Conservation in the highlands of the South Island.
Big cat sightings have been reported for years across the South Island, particularly in Canterbury.
In 1977, Kaiapoi resident Frances Clark reported a close-up sighting of a tiger, but her story was only substantiated once large paw marks and droppings were later discovered on nearby Pines Beach.
In 1996, a large black cat, about the size of a Labrador, was spotted by a woman on a mountain bike near Twizel.
Two years later, something like a cougar was spotted near Cromwell, and Mataura residents described seeing what looked like a lynx.
In 1999, a black panther was spotted in Mackenzie Country and then Banks Peninsula, followed by beasts like the Moeraki mountain lion, Lindis lion, and Ashford the black cat.
