Spoiler Warning: If you haven't yet seen the episode and don't want to know how things turn out, then do not read beyond the line below.

Here's the description of the episode from the MonsterQuest site:

In the fall of 2007, residents of Bolivia, North Carolina started losing pets and farm animals to an unknown creature. Is it the same mystery predator with a taste for blood that preyed on goats and dogs in Bolivia more than 50 years ago?

There's an animal on the prowl in North Carolina that is killing goats and even man's best friend. Strangely however, the animals are never eaten.

The team investigated to try and determine what predator is doing the killing. They set out camera traps, exhumed the bones of a dog who was killed by the thing, and got earwitnesses to try and identify sounds that matched what they heard when they had their encounter.

The camera traps came up empty unfortunately, but the veterinarian that examined the remains concluded that it wasn't other dogs, such as a pitbull, that did the killing. Whatever killed it was a big predator.

Both people who heard (but didn't see) the animal agreed that it sounded most like a big cat, a tiger. Both individuals don't live next door to each other either, they are separated by 200 miles.

After the investigation, two of the men involved in it contact MQ and revealed to them, and us, the cell phone photo of a cougar that was obtained by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. The two men concluded that mysterious beast is most likely a cougar.

Naturally there will be skepticism because cougars aren't supposed to be in North Carolina. There aren't supposed to be black panthers either, but as we saw in season one of MonsterQuest, that is obviously false also.

I don't really understand the dismissive attitude that people have when they hear a report of a cougar existing in a place they think it shouldn't be in, like North Carolina. What's so hard to believe about small but viable population of an animal existing somewhere scientists say it doesn't? How can we know when all the individuals of an animal are no longer in a certain region, especially if it's vast, wooded and rarely explored? I guess it helps if you dismiss eyewitness accounts as misidentifications and hoaxes.

Yes people can be mistaken in what animal they see, but you have to draw the line of plausibility somewhere. If just ten people see something, then yes, those 10 could've been mistaken. But what about 100 people? 500? 1000?

Sooner or later it seems more incredible to be dismissive of the accounts and believe they are all hoaxes or misidentifications than it is to believe that people are actually seeing what they say they are seeing. It's even more incredible to be dismissive if people have good corroborating evidence of their sighting or encounter.

We could also apply the same reasoning to animals that are classified as extinct by science, but are still sighted today. Such as the Thylacine. I hope MQ does an episode on the Tazzy Tiger in the future.

But back to the cougars of North Carolina.

While a cougar being the "vampire beast" makes sense, there are still some questions left.

The most puzzling thing to me is why this cougar (or cougars) would not eat the animals it killed. A cougar is an obligate carnivore or true carnivore. It has to eat meat. So why would it kill these goats and dogs, then not eat them?

And if what happened to the man who lost his pitbull dog, Coco, is true then that is also puzzling. He said after he buried the dog it was dug up and brought back to his yard where it got killed, presumably by the same thing that killed it. Why would a cougar do that if in fact that's what happened? Why not just drag it off into the woods and eat it?

So while some questions linger, we at least got enough evidence in this episode to plausibly identify the mystery animal.