Well, once again, don't believe everything you read in PackyHumor as gospel truth.

This time it wasn't an alert reader that put me onto the case of the big cat: it was a bunch of non-alert riflemen. Somebody posted today's PackyHumor on a bulliten board for AR15 rifles... and got the link to the photo wrong. I came home from work today to find lots and lots of "404: File not found" errors on the PackyHumor website. After putting something into the spot that the riflemen had mistakenly pointed to (so I'd stop getting the errors), I read what they were saying about the piece. One of them posted a URL to the Urban Legend Reference Pages at Snopes.com. "Oh, no," I thought, "Say it isn't so..."

Ah, but even Snopes can't say for sure that the cat isn't real. Just that the story I sent out wasn't.

(taken from http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/photos/bigcat.htm):
Origins: This picture of a man with what looks like a large cat has been making its way around the Internet since at least early 2000. Many different people have sent it to us over the last several months, but only recently have we begun to receive it with the attached text, which leads us to believe that the explanation was created independently of the photograph.

We don't know where the photo came from or exactly what it depicts, but the accompanying text is most certainly somebody's attempt at a bit of creative writing. The AECL has this to say in response to a query about it:

Mr. Robert DeGagne, the owner of this cat, is not a former employee of AECL and the AECL Chalk River facility has certainly not been abandoned for the past fifty years!

We do not know whether or not the size of the cat depicted in the attachment is accurate. If it is true, the size can likely be attributed to a thyroid condition, as described in the article, or cross-breeding.

Turning to our Guinness Book of World Records, we find they list the world's largest domestic cat as a male Queensland, Australia, tabby named Himmy who tipped the scales at just under 47 lbs. and was 38 inches long. However, the on-line version of Guinness includes an article and a picture of a whopping 98-lb. kitty, but it still measures only 41 inches from tip to tail, well short of the 69 inches claimed for the critter in the picture above.

We've seen too many people mistakenly claim that ordinary pictures (such as the infamous lumber car) were "obviously" edited with PhotoShop to maintain that this picture must have been manipulated. The putative Mr. DeGagne does seem to be hefting his allegedly 89-lb. cat with relative effortlessness, but that doesn't necessarily mean the photo has been altered -- the cat in the picture might actually be a lightweight stuffed animal, for example. And even if the photo is a composite, it hasn't been made by simply overlaying a picture of a man with an image of an ordinary housecat: the proportions of the cat shown here indicate that it is indeed much larger than the average domestic feline, even if it isn't as large as claimed in the accompanying text. (The image of the cat could itself be an altered or composite one, however.)

The gag here is that AECL, the organization for which Snowball's owner supposedly worked, is Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, and their facility at Chalk River in Ontario is home to a couple of research reactors. Hence, like a 1950s sci-fi movie, the explanation offered here for Snowball's tremendous size is that "maybe her parents got into something at Chalk River that they shouldn't have," a supposedly abandoned nuclear facility.

S'all for now!
-packy