Rochester mountain lion?
Not kidding. This appears to be a legit video of a mountain lion walking a residential street in Rochester, NY last night. Usually, these videos are questionable in veracity but in the video, you can see that the animal is large, since it passes behind the tree so we can fairly judge the size. It's not unheard of for a puma to travel from the west, through Canada, and into the eastern US (bypassing the Mississippi), but it is rare to see. Or, it could be an escaped domestically kept puma. There have been no reports of this, however. People from the area are saying that other sightings have been reported to police and that the animal has escaped being cornered. First reported via Ring, Neighbors, and Facebook, the homeowner reported to the news station. It's currently the top story in Rochester. Again, I'm leaning towards this being a legit big cat. But stay tuned. Unfortunately, odds are this will not end well for the cat, if it's indeed real.
Unfortunately, these stories come with a ton of jerks making idiotic comments or posting their own hot take videos. The real story is whether this is a real puma roaming the area and where it came from.
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Mountain lions used to live in New York State but were hunted to extinction within our borders. Or so the conventional narrative goes. The alternative narrative is that either they never died out or they have been reintroduced secretly by the state environmental conservation ( to avoid controversy and issues with the farm bureau) or the Mountain Lions wandered back in on their own from out if State or perhaps neighboring Canada. I doubt most of this but see no reason why a family or two could not be out there. I have known people to share photos if "New York State Mountain Lions " on fb or social media but a quick Google image search soon reveals a more convenient alternative, out of state origin for the photos