Werecat

 ( Fictional Werecats ) 

During the witch trials, all shapeshifters, including werewolves, were considered witches whether they were male or female.

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. Many of these tales say it is more ferocious than a lion and more agile than a leopard. The Nunda are believed by some to be a variation of therianthrope that, by day, is a human, but by night becomes the werecat. 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. Huge paw prints were found to be much larger than any known big-cat, but Hitchens dismissed the case, believing it more likely to be a lion with gigantism.

In Thailand a tiger that eats many humans may become a weretiger. There are also other types of weretigers, such as sorcerers with great powers who can change their form to become animals. A weretiger in Thailand known as Suea Saming (, , ) or Saming for short. There are numerous legends related to the viciousness of Suea Samings, and many people of the older generations still believe these tales to be true, though members the younger generations may not have heard them. Samings are men or women who can transform themselves into tigers or tigresses. 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. They said that in Cambodia there were sorcerers who knew how to make Saming oil, and their students once stole that oil and applied it to their bodies. By doing so, there of them were able to transform themselves into Samings. One student got lost inside the town of Chanthaburi. He was a vicious tiger. He roamed around and attacked and killed two people in Pliew village, one person in Pakjun village, and two people in the Seesen forestland. In total, five people were killed by this Saming. Their teacher followed them and told the villagers that his three students had applied the Saming oil to their bodies and were transformed into tigers. The parents of the young men wanted to get their sons back, so they came with the teacher and searched for them everywhere. 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. This would make that tiger transform back into a human, but only if the tiger had not eaten anyone yet; if it had eaten a man, this method would not bring it back to human form. The details of the Saming in each region are different, but they share a common feature; a Saming is a tiger or tigress that is capable of transforming itself into a person for the purpose of deceiving people and then catching them and eating them.

In both present-day Indonesia and Malaysia, there is another kind of weretiger, known as Harimau jadian. 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. In Malaysia too, Bajangs have been described as vampiric or demonic werecats. The Kerinchi people of Sumatra were reputed to have the ability to transform into weretigers.

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. Somewhat similar is the belief of the ; for them the tiger is friendly, and he reserves his anger for their enemies. A man is said to take the form of a tiger in order to wreak a just vengeance.

N. W. Thomas wrote in the 11th ed. of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) that, according to Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868), the kanaima was a human being who employed poison to carry out his function of blood avenger, and that other authorities represent the kanaima as a jaguar, which was either an avenger of blood or the familiar of a cannibalistic sorcerer. 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.

In the US, tell of encounters with feline bipeds; beings similar to the Bigfoot having cat heads, tails, and paws. Feline bipeds are sometimes classified as part of cryptozoology; more often, however, they are interpreted as werecats.