After the series of dog killings near the town of Bladenboro, North Carolina back in the 1950s set off a sort of panic, resulting in a whole buncha armed rednecks traipsing through the woods packing heat, and the police chief, Roy Fores, planning to stake out some dogs as bait for the Beast (which earned him the ire of the local humane society; can you imagine if PETA had been around back then?), the mayor and other authorities realized something needed to be done. They wanted to put a stop to the circus before somebody got killed—not by the Beast, but by some drunken yokel.
Enter the bobcat. Or bobcats, plural.
The poor animal displayed by Mayor Woodrow Fussell as the Beast was most assuredly *not* the same creature that killed all those dogs. No bobcat could manage that degree of damage. There’s even some confusion as to where the scapegoat bobcat came from. It might have been trapped by a local named Luther Davis, or it might have been shot by a self-proclaimed professional hunter named Berry Lewis.
This farce puts me in mind of the time when the French King sent his personal hunter to kill the Beast of Gevaudan, and the hunter did in fact return with a wolf that he proclaimed was the Beast—although the killings in the Gevaudan area continued. The Beast, or La Bate, as it was called, was not a regular wolf, if it was a wolf at all. And the Beast of Bladenboro was certainly no bobcat.
