#clouded leopard -> Sheyu in Meilin's intro in Wild Born. lynx -> Earl of Trunswick. mountain lion -> attack Abeke in Immortal Guardians

[patriotismforstetriol]

It's never a stated requirement, but all the characters we meet in Spirit Animals have an animal local to the region (or at least continent) of their ancestry.

Well, nearly all. All except three two black wildcats -- waist-height, sleek panthers -- summoned by Euran boys.

And look, far as I know, Europe's not got current or historical panther populations. Maybe it's a common enough thing in legends? I dunno!

But I've got a couple of other (more absurd) explanations.

What wildcats does Europe have? It has lynxes[1][2], and it has smaller European wildcats (size of a large housecat). The Trunswick boys' dad has a lynx companion, so you'd figure the similarities would be pointed out if black wildcats were also lynxes. So I'm going to rule out melanistic lynxes (there'd be the 'long tail' issue to answer to too).

Absurd idea 1: See, I'm pretty sure Brunhild's stone adder isn't a real animal. And if there's a real snake it's based on, I think, somehow, it does not have a venom that paralyses people and turns them to stone. So Erdas has animals that don't exist on Earth. (See also: rockback whales, probably, though maybe they're just domesticated right whales.)

So maybe Eura's black wildcats are one of these Erdas-exclusive species. To stick close to realism, though, I'd like to picture them as European wildcats scaled up to a much larger size. Keep those stout housecat-esque faces. Wildcats in Erdas are just that big.

Alternatively, absurd idea 2: You know what big cat never gets mentioned in the Spirit Animals books? Snow leopards. They'll talk about tigers and leopards and jaguars and cheetahs and lions and clouded leopards and mountain lions and lynx, and that covers pretty much all the larger cats. Except for snow leopards.

So this absurd theory is that they don't have snow leopards. On Earth, the natural range of snow leopards is in Central and Northern Asia. Does the Spirit Animals series ever show us central or northern Asian ecosystems? No. Maybe Zhong actually only has South and South East Asian ecosystems (seems unfair, but hey. Anyone want the patriotismforzhong username?).

Or... it could be that the writers combined all those central/northern Asian environments with the western/northern European environments as "Eura", while south/south east Asian + southern European environments (also not mentioned in the series), maybe, have been allocated to "Zhong".

This would mean the "snow leopards" of Erdas are Euran. And for some reason they're all melanistic.

Whatever. Picture how absurdly long Worthy's tail is in this scenario.