You have to know where to look!

During the summer stories about giant dooglike footprints (Baskerville anyone?), kept popping in Djursland, which is a peninsula in western Denmark. The prints were being described as 20-25 cm across, and though claw marks were apparantly obvious, a reporter from a local newspaper started talking about lions, tigers and other kinds of mysterious and dangerous animals. His evidence was, that he had gone out and found the biggest dog in the area - an irish wolfhound, and it's paws were considerably smaller than the reported size. I suggested, that an irish wolfhound though big and tall and long and slightly scary looking is a very big dog, is it also rather slim for its size, and might not necessarily have the biggest paws in the neighborhood.

So I went and had a look,and it turned out that the tracks were smaller than reported, though with 15-20 cm still quite big, and that at least three different dogs in the area had paws within that size range - a mastiff, a st. bernhard and a cross between something or other. I was able to match the mastiff's tracks to a least three of the sightings - apparantly nobody had paid any attention to the facts, that there were human tracks right next to the dogtracks.

It just goes to show - don't trust reporters, and look in the right places.