In British folklore and urban legend, British big cats refers to the subject of reported sightings of non-native, typically large felids feral in the United Kingdom. Many of these creatures have been described as "panthers", "pumas" or "black cats".
There have been rare isolated incidents of recovered individual animals, often medium-sized species such as the Eurasian lynx, though in one 1980 case, a puma was captured alive in Scotland.[1] These are generally believed to have been escaped or released exotic pets that had been held illegally, possibly released after the animals became too difficult to manage or after the introduction of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976.[2]
The existence of a population of "true big cats" in Britain, however, especially a breeding population, has been rejected by experts and the British government owing to a lack of convincing evidence for the presence of these animals.[3] [4] Supposed sightings made from a distance have been largely written off as domestic cats close to the subject being misidentified as a larger animal sited farther away,[5] [6] with one folklorist considering such sightings of creatures to be little more than a "media artifact" driven by British journalistic practices in the 1970s and 1980s[7] while another described it as the result of a situation where "media-generated interest encourages rumour, misinterpretation, and exaggeration".[8]
A medieval Welsh poem Pa Gwr in the Black Book of Carmarthen mentions a Cath Palug, meaning "Palug's cat" or "clawing cat", which roamed Anglesey until slain by Cei. In the Welsh Triads, it was the offspring of the monstrous sow Henwen.[9]
The New Forest folktale of the Stratford Lyon tells of how John de Stratford pulled a giant, red, antlered lion from the ground at South Baddesley in the New Forest in the year 1400. The story is first recorded in the marginalia of an 18th-century bible. In the late 20th century, sightings of the lion were recorded in the vicinity of the Red Lion Pub, Boldre.[10]
William Cobbett recalled in his Rural Rides how, as a boy in the 1760s, he had seen a cat "as big as a middle-sized Spaniel dog" climb into a hollow elm tree in the grounds of the ruined Waverley Abbey near Farnham in Surrey. Later, in New Brunswick, he saw a "lucifee" (Canada lynx) "and it seemed to me to be just such a cat as I had seen at Waverley."[11]
Phantom sightings are common throughout much of the UK, with BBC Wildlife Magazine in 2006 reporting the "top ten" counties or regions of Great Britain where claims of sightings had been between April 2004 and July 2005 were as follows:[12]
| Region | Devon | Yorkshire | Scotland | Wales | Gloucestershire | Sussex | Cornwall | Kent | Somerset | Leicestershire | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of sightings | 676 | 127 | 125 | 123 | 104 | 103 | 99 | 92 | 91 | 89 |
Phantom big cats have also formed the basis of several local urban legends within the United Kingdom where unexplained animal deaths, typically livestock, would be blamed on such imagined creatures, such as the Beast of Bodmin Moor[18] and the Cotswolds Big Cat.[19] The search for physical "evidence" to support these claims has typically been found to have far more ordinary and less sensational origins. In the case of the Beast of Bodmin, when a skull found in the River Fowey was presented to the Natural History Museum as proof of its existence, it was found to have been cut from a leopard skin rug,[20] [8] while in the case of the Cotswolds Big Cat, the only predator DNA that was found was of foxes.[21]
One particular instance of note of this phenomenon is the "Beast of Exmoor" (sometimes referred to as the "Exmoor Beast"). While stories about the Beast of Exmoor originally surfaced in a similar fashion to other local "big cat stories", with sightings of the creature reported as early as 1970, the story came to national prominence in the United Kingdom in 1983 when a South Molton farmer named Eric Ley claimed to have lost over 100 sheep in the space of three months, all of them apparently killed by violent throat injuries.[22] [23] The claim that these livestock had been killed by a mysterious beast led to "nationwide interest", with the Daily Express offering a substantial financial reward for video footage of the creature, while the government took the unusual step of deploying a team of Royal Marine snipers to hunt down (and presumably kill) the creature.[8] [24]
Despite extensive media coverage and both professional and amateur hunting for the creature, which in one unfortunate case saw a cryptozoologist having to be rescued after spending two nights stuck in his own trap,[25] no large cat has ever been positively identified to explain such incidents as the 1983 livestock slayings, with them now being attributed to other causes such as large dogs.[26] Despite the lack of evidence, the Beast of Exmoor persists to some extent in the public imagination; alleged sightings continue to be reported occasionally around Exmoor long after an escaped exotic pet (such as a leopard or puma) would have died,[27] [28] while one national newspaper reported a found carcass alleged to be the Beast of Exmoor that was later identified as a dead seal.[29] Beyond these rumours regarding the creature itself, it has been posited by one journalist that the lasting legacy of the urban legend may be as a mythological base that real-life wildlife stories such as the Emperor of Exmoor can reference.[30]
A Canadian lynx shot in Devon in 1903 is now in the collection of the Bristol Museum. Analysis of its teeth suggests that prior to its death, it had spent a significant amount of time in captivity.[31]
In 1980, a puma was captured in Inverness-shire, Scotland, and was subsequently put into the Highland Wildlife Park zoo, being given the name "Felicity". Zoo director Eddie Orbell concluded that the animal had been tamed and might not have been released for long, noting that it enjoyed being tickled.[32]
On two separate occasions, jungle cats have been found dead after being hit by a car, with the most accepted theory being that these are individuals escaped from private ownership.[33]
In 1996, police in Fintona, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, shot a cat. It was reportedly a caracal, a medium-sized wildcat species found in Africa and Asia, although a police report described it as a lynx.[34]
In a well-reported 2001 case ("the Beast of Barnet"), a young female Eurasian lynx was captured alive by police and vets in Cricklewood, North London, after a chase across school playing fields and into a block of flats. It was placed in London Zoo and given the name "Lara" before ultimately being transferred to a zoo in France to breed.[35] [36] The captured lynx was found to be only 18 months old, although considerably larger than an average domestic cat.
In 2006, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published a list of predatory cats typically kept as exotic pets that they know to have escaped in the United Kingdom, although most of these have been recaptured.[37]