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11/11/2009

A large black cat believed to be a panther is roaming the forests around the Belgian town of Malmedy, close to the border with Germany, and police plan to have it shot if they keep failing to catch it.

Hikers have spotted the animal repeatedly in recent weeks. At the end of October one man even managed to film it but the footage was too blurry to identify it clearly. No one knows where it came from because no zoos or circuses have reported one missing, but police believe it may have been privately held by someone in France, where a panther was on the loose at the end of August.

The French police didn't manage to catch it and it may have headed east to the Benelux countries, trotting first through Luxembourg and now through Belgium. For Germans, the case has awakened unhappy memories of Bruno , the brown bear who ventured from Austria into Bavaria in 2006 where he was tragically shot dead after a seven-week rampage in which he killed dozens of sheep and famously sat on a guinea pig.

Between an Industrial Park and a Garbage Dump

The director of the Euregio Zoo in the nearby German city of Aachen, Wolfram Graf-Rudolf, said the panther didn't yet pose enough of a danger to warrant killing it.

"I don't' think everything has been tried to catch it," Graf-Rudolf told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It's relatively hard to get it with a tranquilizer gun because you have to get within 20 meters as the projectile is heavy. The animal has so far always bolted whenever anyone came within 100 meters of it."

Graf-Rudolf said the cat appeared to be stuck in an area of forest near an industrial park and a garbage dump.

"The cat is, of course, capable of harming humans. But I don't like the contradiction that police are saying it poses a danger even though no one can get closer to 100 meters before it runs off."

"If the animal becomes emaciated and aggressive then one shouldn't hesitate to shoot it but I don't see that danger at the moment," said Graf-Rudolf. "We shouldn't waste time now. We should spend two or three days trying to catch it with cat traps and cordon off the area."

'People's Safety Takes Precedence'

He said his zoo could take the cat in once it was caught. "Panthers aren't threatened with extinction but it's a living creature and as long as one can try and catch it alive one should do so."

But at the moment, it's not up to the German authorities. Michel Velz of the Malmedy police told the tabloid Bild on Monday: "If we can't catch the panther we unfortunately will have to shoot him. People's safety takes precedence, after all it's a dangerous predator."

For the media, the all-important question is what the panther should be called. So far it has rather unimaginatively been referred to in Germany as the "Eifel Panther," after the region of wooded hills that straddles Germany's border with Belgium.