19 November 2014, Berlin

When I was in France last weekend the big news was the sighting of a tiger outside Paris.  A blurry picture of the beast itself  circulated widely, and pictures of its footprints seemed to indicate, at the least, some kind of big wild feline.  Some 200 police and a helicopter were mobilized to search for it.

Joggers were warned to keep away from a local forest. However, by Friday night, the tiger was beginning to shrink; a vet declared on national TV that the cat was not big enough to be a tiger, or even a lynx.  “It might be a very large house cat,” she said, although she estimated it weighed 50 kilos, which would be a very large house cat indeed.  By the end of the weekend, the search was called off, and the “superstar of social media” was revealed to be “nothing but a big cat.”