The Kellas Cat is a small black feline found in Scotland. Once thought to be a mythological wild cat, with its few sightings dismissed as hoaxes, a specimen was shot and killed in 1984 by a gamekeeper named Ronnie Douglas and found to be a hybrid between wild and domestic sub-species of Felis silvestris. The specimen was named by cryptozoologist Karl Shuker after the village of Kellas, Moray, where it was first found. Shuker suggested that the Cait Sidhe of Celtic mythology is based on folk memory of Kellas Cats.
The Kellas cat is described as being over 65 cm (25 inches) long, with powerful and long hind legs and a tail that can grow to be around 30 cm (12 inches) long. A specimen is kept in a museum in Elgin.
Famous quotes containing the word cat:
“As I walked on the glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers’ dwellings in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a soldier’s cat walking up a cleated plank in a high loophole designed for mus-catry, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness and all her paths were peace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)