hogs on a branch members ranch in texas. This was close to college station. It was right before dusk and we were laying some bait close to an open field. We jumped back in the razor and drove off about 50 yards to the other side of the field and set up our guns. We had done this a number of times as the ferrel hog population is out of control in the area and its kind of fun.
After we set up and were waiting we noticed what appeared to be a large animal creeping around a bush. we couldn't tell at that moment what it was but after a minute it jumped up and looked like a cougar but was completely black. We knew it wasn't a bobcat. We hunted those a bunch in the area. It ran back into the forest. We debated for a long time what it was. We didn't think there were cougars in the area. We went back to the members "compound". and told him what we saw. He said he saw it a few times in the past and said it was most likely a black panther. He had called the fish cops on a previous sighting and they believed it was a black panther as well. They had had calls before. They didn't make it public knowledge that there was one in the area because they didn't want a bunch of red necks trying to hunt it and shooting at things they thought were black panthers. Their theory was it probably came from florida. They also believed that there was probably more than one.
This is the thing that scared me most. We called them and told them we had seen it and they came out to look around the area, We started chatting with him and he said that through out the state of texas there were over 10,000 tigers, lions bears etc that people kept as pets or in zoo's or wildlife preserves.That's not the scary part. The scary part is that they have had hundreds of those escape from their enclosures from all over texas that had never been found. He estimated that they had 100 missing tigers and 200 missing lions that haven't been accounted for over the last couple of decades. He said most of them were lost in west and south texas where some people had tried to just "fence them in". They also of numerous cases of escape exotic game animals like zebras, kudu, elk etc that have also escaped from hunting fenced in hunting areas. Which on a side note is weak hunting. I went to a bunch of them over my time in texas and some were just people standing in hunting blinds waiting for the feeders to turn on and basically domesticated animals would walk up to the feeder.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-creature-on-the-loose-puts-milwaukee-residents-on-edge/ar-AAdzlht?ocid=iehp