Leonard thinks it's the end of civilization

claytoncubitt:

Walton Ford, ‘The Island’ (detail), 2009

“This animal scared the hell out of the settlers,” Ford said, exuberantly. “It looked like a wolf, but with stripes, like a tiger, and they could get up on their hind legs, which made them even scarier. The settlers were sheepherders, and they built up this myth of a huge, bipedal, nocturnal vampire-beast that sucked the blood of sheep. The settlers put a bounty on these animals and began killing them off in every possible way - poison, traps, snares, guns. The last known one died in captivity in the nineteen-thirties, but they lived on in people’s imagination.” -Calvin Thomas, ‘Man and Beast’, New Yorker