[6] Depending on the story in question, the species involved can be a domestic cat,[7] a tiger,[8] a lion,[9] a leopard,[10] a lynx, or any other type, including some that are purely mythical felines.

[15] In Africa, there are folk tales that speak of the "Nunda," or the "Mngwa," a big cat of immense size that stalks villages at night.

No actual evidence of such a creature existing has ever been documented, but in 1938, a British administrator named William Hitchens, working in Tanzania, was told by locals that a monstrous cat had been attacking people at night.

One famous story about these transforming tigers from the literature of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) that some uesd to prowl through Chanthaburi province; the locals continue to be very afraid of Samings.

The parents told villagers that if they met one of these tigers, they should hit him with a shoulder pole or cover his footprints with coconut shells.

Linguist and writer Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad for example has compiled oral stories of a famous weretiger named Dato' Paroi fabled to have led the flock of all tigers that roamed in his home area of Negeri Sembilan.

[22] In the central area of the Indonesian island of Java, the power of transformation is regarded as due to inheritance, to the use of spells, to fasting and willpower, to the use of charms, etc.

Save when it is hungry or has just cause for revenge it is not hostile to man; in fact, it is said to take its animal form only at night and to guard the plantations from wild pigs.

Variants of this belief assert that the shapeshifter does not recognize his friends unless they call him by name, or that he goes out as a mendicant and transforms himself to take vengeance on those who refuse him alms.

He also mentioned that in 1911 some Europeans in Brazil believed that the seventh child of the same sex in unbroken succession becomes a were-man or woman, and takes the form of a horse, goat, jaguar or pig.

[24] Assertions that werecats truly exist and have an origin in supernatural or religious realities have been common for centuries, with these beliefs often being hard to entirely separate from folklore.

In the 19th century, occultist J. C. Street asserted that material cat and dog transformations could be produced by manipulating the "ethereal fluid" that human bodies are supposedly floating in.

[25] The Catholic witch-hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, asserted that witches can turn into cats, but that their transformations are illusions created by demons.

[26] New Age author John Perkins asserted that every person has the ability to shapeshift into "jaguars, bushes, or any other form" by using mental power.