Holy Leopard Skin Scam

A Cryptozoological Investigation

Finally, we can take a break from charedim and army and get back to my planned posts! But first, some announcements about my presentations next week in Lawrence, Teaneck, Monsey and Brooklyn:

And now back to our regular scheduled programming!

With my obsession for the intersection of Judaism and the animal kingdom, I’m fascinated by anything which connects them in any way. So, for example, I have very special bags for my tallis and tefillin, which are made from a giraffe pelt. Naturally I was intrigued when someone told me that he had just purchased a custom tallis with an atara made from a leopard pelt! He sent me a photo of it:

Oh dear.

I told him that it’s not from a leopard. I have encountered many leopards, I’ve even been bitten and scratched and pounced upon by them. I know exactly what leopard fur looks like, and it doesn’t look like that! It looks like this:

Leopards have rosettes - blotch-like markings, with lighter centers on most of the hide, and uneven solid black shapes on the limbs. As the verse states, “הֲיַהֲפֹךְ כּוּשִׁי עוֹרוֹ וְנָמֵר חֲבַרְבֻּרֹתָיו - Shall the Ethiopian change his skin, and the leopard his blotches?” The fur on the tallit, in contrast, had even scallop-shaped markings.

(Incidentally, leopards are also endangered, and trade in their pelts is prohibited under CITES, the international wildlife trade laws.)

The person replied by sending me a picture of several such atarot that had been made, and the entire pelt from which these were taken:

Very nice. But still definitely not a leopard. And nor is it a cheetah, which has round spots:

But if it’s not a leopard, and not a cheetah, what is it?

A similar pelt had been the subject of fascination in a since-deleted 2007 blog post by English palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish, who also writes extensively on cryptozoology (the investigation of mysterious creatures). He had come across such a pelt that was owned by Mark Fraser, founder of Big Cats In Britain, a cryptozoology group that collects evidence and information from witnesses to investigate alleged sightings of big cats in the UK countryside. Naish posted a picture of the pelt online, and asked his fellow cryptozoologists for help in figuring out what animal it came from.

All kinds of suggestions were offered. Maybe it was some sort of unknown species of hyena. But most believed it to be something in the feline family; maybe some sort of mutant leopard, or clouded leopard, or serval, or variety of cheetah. Yet no animal with such a scalloped pattern was known to science. What could it be?

I’m happy to tell you that I know the answer. Both the British specimen, and the one that was used for the tallis, are the same species. It’s something that I’ve seen in the Old City of Jerusalem. And its identity may surprise you.