Sunday, February 03, 2008
Phony pictures often look anything but
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
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The Wild Life blog
If you have e-mail and are known to be interested in the outdoors and nature, there's a good chance some interesting pictures showed up in your in box this week.
The series of four pictures showed a mountain lion prowling around on snowy porch outside a cabin.
Nothing too shocking about that. What was shocking was the location.
"These were taken in Giles County near Big Stony Creek" read the accompanying story.
Finally, photographic proof that Virginia really has mountain lions.
Or not.
I quickly pointed my Internet browser to Snopes.com, a site dedicated to getting to the bottom of urban legends and other rumors.
A search for "cougar patio" quickly turned up the four pictures, along with the real story.
Snopes.com researchers spoke to Dave Hamilton with the Missouri Department of Conservation's Cougar Response Team.
Hamilton said he had been tracking the pictures for a while -- Missouri is among the many states in which they were supposedly taken -- and that the shots had been taken in 2001 or 2002 in Wyoming.
Wildlife-related pictures and stories frequently make the rounds on the Internet and e-mail, but I don't recall any set of pictures getting latched on to and forwarded with such enthusiasm.
In the span of a couple of days I got the pictures from probably a half-dozen people, including a couple from inside the office who believed they were passing on a potentially juicy news tip.
The pictures even made their way onto a new local nature blog, although Seth Williamson, one of the blog's contributors, quickly added an addendum when he learned that the pictures didn't originate in Virginia.
As he wrote to me in an e-mail, "it's embarrassing, but ... the photos looked so real."
And that can be the real challenge with telling the difference between what's fact and what's fiction.
The pictures look real because often they are real.
Those pictures that circulated of the whitetail buck swimming in the ocean and then being rescued by boaters? Real.
The picture of the dead moose hanging on the power line 40 feet in the air? Real.
The scouting camera pictures of the bobcat attacking the deer? Real.
It's the stories that get twisted.
Because it's just so easy.
For example, in my reply to one guy who sent me the cougar pictures, I included another mountain lion picture I lifted from the Internet.
I wrote that I wondered if the patio cougar was the same cougar I encountered near Roanoke's Patrick Henry High School the other day.
In "my" picture the cougar, obviously the resident of a zoo, was lying playfully on its back.
"He was quite friendly," I added.
All the guy had to do was tweak my note, or cut it and write his own, forward the picture and the rumor mill would have been rolling.
Basic psychology is at work here, of course.
An urban legend -- or, rural legend -- needs a couple of key ingredients to catch on.
For one, it has to seem believable.
The obviously altered shot of the guy whose deer has 50 points and a rack as wide as his garage doesn't get traction because it's just too unbelievable.
But most wildlife rumors catch on because they feature authentic pictures and the accompanying stories don't seem too far fetched.
It helps when the story is something people want to believe.
Just like we want to believe that the guy holding the huge whitetail shot the buck in the Virginia county we hunt (not Iowa, where he really shot it) many of us really want to believe that cougars are roaming around our state.
We've heard so many stories about sightings, many from reasonable sources, that we are just craving hard proof.
The irony is that when someone finally does get an authentic picture of a cougar in Virginia -- and mountain lions might not be here now, but they will eventually get here -- he will have a hard time convincing us that it's real.
