[Iain]

Ever heard of the ''Beast of Bodmin''?

Every year in England there are a handful of reported sightings of ''large cats'', usually described as panthers. An escaped lynx has been shot here and a very large cat was also shot in Scotland (turned out to be genetic freakery due to breeding between Scottish wildcats and domestic cats). The theories suggest that panthers or leopards were released from private collections when legislation was tightened.

Before you laugh

http://www.pcfe.ac.uk/cats/debate/graphics/app5.jpg From The Times October 28th 1976

http://www.geocities.com/bellow_it/beast.gif Not a very good image.

http://www.geocities.com/bellow_it/

Britain passed the Dangerous Wild Animals Act in 1976, an Act which prohibited the keeping of dangerous wild animals without a licence. It's been suggested that many owners of such animals, unable to comply with the expensive terms of a licence and unwilling to have their pets destroyed, have released their animals into the wild. .....

....Pumas and leopards have been spotted roaming about the countryside with their young, according to a leading expert. Zoologist Quentin Rose warns that unless something is done, there will be a population explosion of the cats within 20 years. "I would estimate that there are around 100 cats loose in the British countryside and in some of those areas I know there is more than one big cat because they have been breeding," he said.

There have been reports of sheep with their throats ripped out and farmyard dogs viciously killed by ''large cats''.

Any of you guys fancy coming over here and ending the debate with a kill?

[Art Eatman]

Yeah, I've read of this before...

What? Your government isn't protecting you? Not protecting farm animals? Not protecting pets? My, my. Whatever is government for?

Sorry. What with airport "security" and the thievery, and the hassle of moving about with firearms, I'll just stay here, thank you.

:), Art

[Duncan Idaho]

I'll second what Art said. Great-great grandpa Coop left Manchester and the crumbling Empire for a reason. I'll respect him and his decision by never going back.

Ta!

[Beaker]

While there may be periodic escapees from exotic petkeepers, I seriously doubt that a 100-lb plus predatory cat which normally has a territorial range of up to 100 square miles could sustain a breeding population in a nation with virtually no uninhabited wildlands without a confirmed sighting or dead animal.

[Iain]

Well thanks for the ''England is bad mmmkay'' mantra.

To the serious poster

http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/s.carver/pop.gif

Not a very good image but you can see the population centres of the South East, Central Midlands and North. Look in the centre of Wales, the South-West but certainly the North of England and Scotland.

In the more pressured environs would they maintain ranges of the size you quote? There are literally millions of rabbits in this country, that is the theory behind how they survive.

http://www.occultopedia.com/images/panther.jpg

Lot of myth and legend around the Beast, to quote one site:

during the British army's hunt for the Exmoor beast, the creature was trapped and surrounded in a barn. When the troopers went into the building, it was found to be empty. It has even been suggested that these creatures come from a parallel universe, slipping in and out of our dimension.

[Art Eatman]

Face it, St Johns, England/Scotland have long had a reputation for significant effort in maintaining quality hunting. Our shotgunning derives directly from your efforts in design of guns and sporting uses. Your country has long had a high reputation for quality firearms.

That was then, this is now.

YOUR people create YOUR problems. Fools brought in unsuitable animals as pets. Other fools dreamed up expensive and overly complicated paperwork to try to control the situation. Human nature did the rest, leading to neither pets nor controls thereof.

And the Lord said to Murgatroyd, "You've been a good man, all your life. I'll grant you any one wish you like." Murgatroyd responded that since he was afraid of flying, he wanted a bridge to Hawaii for access for a vacation. The Lord explained that it would use up too much of the resources of the earth, and was thus an unsound idea. "Anything else?" "Well," said Murgatroyd, "I'd like to understand the mind of the anti-gun Liberal."

"You want two lanes or four, on that bridge?"

God save the Queen.

Art

[mete]

New Jersey has now admitted that they have introduced mountain lions in the pine barrens, near fort dix, to cut down the large deer population. NY is still in denial.

[Iain]

Since when was this good humoured thread, asking some knowledgeable people a serious question about whether they think this is possible, about the ''evils'' of England?

Nice way to make a Brit feel welcome, and from a mod too.

Now:

http://www.britishbigcats.org/Images/Suffolk2.jpg

Was shot on the Norfolk/Suffolk border.

http://www.britishbigcats.org/Images/LEPCAT.jpg

Shot on the Isle of Wight.

Hunting is still legal with bolt-actions.

[Iain]

http://www.britishbigcats.org/Images/deernumberssmal_2.jpg

Is this what a cougar type deer kill looks like?

[Duncan Idaho]

Nice way to make a Brit feel welcome, and from a mod too.You Brits do nothing to make Americans welcome, so why should you be miffed if we reciprocate? You used to be our cousins. You used to be capable of greatness. Now you seem (to me at the very least) to be living in some sort of warped universe where helplessness is considered a virtue!

I live on a small island. If a cat that could bring down deer was running around loose among the children and elderly, we would grab our guns, hunt the S.O.B. down, and kill it like a Lobsterback at Yorktown.

Problem solved.

I reckon that you folks may just have to wring your hands, or bang on pots with a ladle, or do whatever it is you do in these situations. Call a bobby or something. I don't know what to tell you.

[MicroBalrog]

Now you seem (to me at the very least) to be living in some sort of warped universe where helplessness is considered a virtue!

Dear Duncan,

You seem to be creating this really big generalisation.

Did St.Johns seem to you to be like that?

Or do you think Zedicus, Steven Kendrick, Sean Gabb are like that? No? So get back to the High Road.

[Iain]

So, I've made you feel unwelcome?

Anyway to get back on topic:

Releasing a non-native animal into the wild in Britain was not a criminal offence until the early 1980's. Reports of cats in the wild have skyrocketed since the 1960's. Evidence I have read today points towards it being pumas or cougars whichever term you prefer.
http://www.beastwatch.org.uk/images/cougar.jpg

You guys don't like them I believe, they do kill people occasionally.

A short time after in the afternoon - this was late afternoon - my son, who was about 19 at the time, came charging into the office, shouting, "The pumas are out, the pumas are out." So we put the emergency procedure into action, and all shot out. When we got there all the pumas were there, correct. He showed me where he saw these two pumas, they'd been going up and down in the leaves at the side of the pen. There was not a sign of them. He said that he knew they were pumas, he was brought up with pumas as a lad.
from a public debate held in Cornwall. The speaker is the owner of Dartmoor Wildlife Park.

from www.pcfe.ac.uk/cats/debate

There are no confirmed reports of hurt to humans, there is a 30,000 pound reward for a photograph.

[MicroBalrog]

I have a vision of thousands of people combing the countryside with cameras.

[Iain]

It's happened, the initial reward was for a corpse. There were so many people walking about with guns looking for it that the newspaper changed the terms.

Also from the same source as quoted above: there is approximately one sighting every 28-35 days. Some will of course be domestic cats where the scale is misinterpreted and some will be dogs.

http://www.bigcats.org/abc/images/felicity1.jpg

Felicity was very tame and captured in 1980

''It was reported that a prisoner serving a sentence at Winchester Prison, David Carter, claimed he had released a pair of pumas near Cannich and Felicity was one of these. Detective John Cathcart, who was called in to investigate, said all the details could have been gleamed by the man from press reports. It is interesting, however, that the sightings of pumas in the Cannich area did not end with the capture of Felicity.
Chris Smith, Scottish Big Cats''

[Art Eatman]

St Johns, your very first post concluded with, "Any of you guys fancy coming over here and ending the debate with a kill?"

Possibly I misunderstood. It looked to me like a plea for help. One is generally uninterested in helping those who have put themselves into some problem position, when the position resulted from an avoidance of reality...

Overall, I find the situation highly amusing, with parallels here in the U.S. There is ongoing denial of the existence of lions in many areas, although the sightings have been made by people who know what they are seeing.

There is also denial of the potential for harm to people from the presence of these "They aren't here!" critters, usually by those who believe "Bambi" is a documentary.

The mountain lion is known by several names: Puma, cougar, panther (colloquially, "painter"). Usage seems to be a function of where one is in the U.S. While there are some minor differences due to isolation of populations (Florida, e.g.), they all interbreed.

Lions generally first go for the paunch of a fresh kill. They get some needed elements from the partially digested grasses, as well as from such parts as the liver. They commonly hide the remains and later return to the kill and eat from the hams, back and shoulders. A 100-pound lion can drag a 500-pound elk a surprising distance. That dead deer does look like the remains of a fresh kill.

Of all the exotic cats, only the margay, the smallest, is readily tamed into "pethood". With full maturity, all the rest can suddenly become hostile and very dangerous.

Art

[Iain]

I was joking Art, though if anybody is good with a camera then they are welcome to come have a go at the 30,000 pound prize then they are more than welcome. Course if they want to teach me to track cougars and say recieve, say 10% cut, then they are welcome to that too.

Art - when you say lions, you mean African lions? That is a little more scary. Lots of confusion of the term ''panther'' most take it to mean melanistic leopards, of which there are believed to be some in the UK too.

Thing I have also read about cougars is their hunting technique sometimes involves hitting the target at high enough speed to break ribs. Or that they are so quiet that victims are completely unaware until there are teeth in the head.

Does this look like a cougar attack?

http://www.bigcats.org/abc/images/bianca.jpg

Would be very interested in reports of ''alien'' cats in the US.

[Duncan Idaho]

So, I've made you feel unwelcome?Your entire country has.You seem to be creating this really big generalisation.Perhaps in your opinion. If your opinion begins to matter to me, I'll be sure to let you know.Did St.Johns seem to you to be like that?Yes Or do you think Zedicus, Steven Kendrick, Sean Gabb are like that?What are you talking about?So get back to the High Road. See above

[Iain]

Maybe you should get back on topic or get off the thread.

Keep the personal insults to yourself.

[Duncan Idaho]

Maybe you should get back on topic or get off the thread.You asked: Any of you guys fancy coming over here and ending the debate with a kill?I answered.

Keep the personal insults to yourself.My answers reflected my honest opinion. If you choose to see them as insults, that is your prerogative.St Johns, your very first post concluded with, "Any of you guys fancy coming over here and ending the debate with a kill?" To which you answered:I was joking Art, Since that is the case, then what is the topic of this thread?

[MicroBalrog]

then what is the topic of this thread?

The presence/absence of large felinde predators in the UK and their danger to humans.

[Tamara]

I live on a small island. If a cat that could bring down deer was running around loose among the children and elderly, we would grab our guns, hunt the S.O.B. down, and kill it like a Lobsterback at Yorktown.

*snicker* "...and then we'd get locked up by Wildlife Management agents and have our jail cells picketed by PETA members while newscasters described us as barbarians on the Teevee."

Careful, Duncan, we're a lot closer to the situation you decry than the idealized one you paint. ;)

[Duncan Idaho]

The presence/absence of large felinde predators in the UK and their danger to humans.If that is the case, then it is off topic. This is a hunting forum.

[Iain]

Mods - move, lock, whichever, I could do without a flame war. I would point out the Art didn't seem to mind it's presence here, neither did Tamara.

[Duncan Idaho]

*snicker* "...and then we'd get locked up by Wildlife Management agents and have our jail cells picketed by PETA members while newscasters described us as barbarians on the Teevee."Perhaps that is the case where you live Tamara. I work for the WA St. Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. By law, any citizen may lawfully kill a predator in the act of depridation. If a cougar was spotted stalking livestock, children, etc. it would be dead before it hit the ground.

Not everywhere in America is :cuss:, but you do have a point that we have more than our share of places that are.

[kudu]

What Brits call pumas we call mountain lions or cougars. Just so there is no confusion between names of big cats.:)

[Iain]

You don't call them ''panthers'' at all? That is the single most confusing term applied to cats there is.

[Duncan Idaho]

You don't call them ''panthers'' at all? That is the single most confusing term applied to cats there is.Nowhere that I know of, but there are quite a number of names for them. In upstate New York they used to be called cat-a-mounts.

To make this post about hunting: bear/cougar (they are sold together) permits in Washington state cost $10.95 for residents. Second cougar tags cost $10.95. Bear/cougar tags cost $219.00 for non-residents.

We have more than enough of the varmints. Feel free to come and whack a couple of them.

[Beaker]

I don't doubt that there have been some escapes, and that some of them may have successfully returned to the wild for a time. I still doubt that they can set up a successful breeding population so relatively undetected. Here's why:

Even with a relatively uninhabited area, if all there is to eat is rabbits and there are no competing large predators, a cougar would move to where there was larger prey. (In the Americas, the only areas where cougars routinely survive on small prey like rabbits and armadillos are areas where the jaguar is the top predator and there's very little large prey to go around anyway.) While a cat that size can SURVIVE on bunnies, it WANTS deer and other large animals, because it's much better energy expended to energy gained bargain. In the absence of large populations of deer, it will target livestock. My area has a pretty damn low population density- there are more coyotes around than humans, and more mule deer than you can shake a rifle at- but we're still tripping over cougars every breeding season. Also, as big as that area looks, it's not big enough for more than a few cats. As soon as a few litters were born, the subadults would disperse... toward more populated areas. (Most cougars killed in cities like Boulders are subadult males looking for a territory. They're shy, but not wanting to be killed by mommy and daddy seems to override fear of humans.)

[Art Eatman]

St Johns, "cougar" seems to be the more universal name. "Panther" is about the only name used in Florida, and is common in Georgia.

"Mountain lion" is the majority-use name in Texas, I know. (Or, just "lion".) "Puma" is more commonly used in the Rocky Mountain states, from reading of interactions there, although it may nowadays be more of an archaic term. "Painter" is an old time colloquialism common to the Appalachians. I've read the word "catamount" more in stories from the early colonial period.

Does that help? :)

Beaker, down in south Brewster County, we have more lions than deer, seems like. They like quail, javelina, and jackrabbits as well as deer. And goats. They have been know to come into yards for house cats and--in one instance--into a house for a dog.

They'll respond to a wounded-rabbit predator call, as some guys found out one night. The split-window was open in the back of their pickup truck's cab, and a great hairy paw came waving around inside. It was a redefinition of the phrase "exciting moment".

I imagine that those areas of the Isles where there are deer could support a breeding population. The climate is no harsher than lion-populated areas of the states.

Art

[Iain]

In the UK we use the term panther to apply to melanistic leopards (black panthers) See where the confusion arose? :)

Now Duncan, was that an invitation? That is one invitation I would love to accept, they ain't endangered so I will come ''whack a few''.

You think a cougar would be able to alter it's habits sufficiently to survive, I do. There are reports of horses being attacked (see previous page) foals being taken, some sheep attacks, nobody regulates the deer population to any great extent, I doubt three or four a week are going to missed. They also can decimate our other ''aliens'' (the rabbits) as much as they like.

Wallabies and wild boar have escaped and survived here. There is a definite niche for an over-predator in the British Isles. The largest we have is the black and white badger, our foxes never top 25lbs. We had bears, they were wiped out 700 years ago, wolves were wiped out 300 years ago. The last evidence for a larger cat in the British Isles suggests that they disappeared over 3,000 years ago. Wolves and bears may well have helped in this but man has eliminated them and may have created a niche for a cat population.

http://www.britishbigcats.org/Images/Suffolk2.jpg

A lynx (note the absence of tail) they still exist in certain areas of Europe, why not Britain if ''accidentally'' re-introduced? There are viable and monitored experiments with release of wolves in Scotland, they can survive in smallish packs, so I guess a lone cougar or lynx could too.

There are no proven attacks on a human yet (some claims that really look like hoaxes for money) so I am quite happy to let them go. I think for the reasons Beaker described they will never become a large presence and/or a pest. Any brazen ones, and/or attacks on humans and I support their destruction 100%.

To bring it round to hunting again, what would you suggest rifle, bore and ammunition-wise to bring down a cougar?

[Beaker]

I'm not arguing that a cougar couldn't survive in Britain- it could do so quite nicely- I'm arguing that a breeding population of them is unlikely. Cougars can have up to eight kits per litter, with the usual number being around three. In a species that is solitary, requires a large territory to be happy but is on a small island by cougar standards, and can survive on smaller game but prefers and pursues larger, a breeding population of ever-more-widely dispersing cougars couldn't last long as unconfirmed rumors, and these reports have been going around since the early seventies if not longer. If anything the cougar issue would become apparent very rapidly, because in the absence of competing predators there'd be a higher survival rate for kittens, and in the absence of having been hunted they'd be a lot bolder than is typical in America.

I'm not saying the island couldn't support a population, I'm saying it couldn't and have cougars remaining as simple rumor for decades.

[Duncan Idaho]

"Panther" is about the only name used in Florida, and is common in Georgia.That's right! I stand corrected. I forgot about the whole Florida panther thing. Now Duncan, was that an invitation? That is one invitation I would love to accept, they ain't endangered so I will come ''whack a few''.Anytime from August 1st through March 15th.

The bunnyhuggers managed to outlaw hunting cougars with dogs, but they are fairly plentiful, so there is a reasonable chance of seeing one.To bring it round to hunting again, what would you suggest rifle, bore and ammunition-wise to bring down a cougar? Pretty much anything from .243 on up. Cougars aren't that tough to kill. Hitting them is the tricky part. A sidearm (9mm or better) is also a good thing to carry, in the event that the cougar chooses CQB.

[Iain]

Would there be a higher survival rate for kits when they were competing with bro and sis for food and then a terrority? Didn't you say that males often get shot because they wander into towns to get away from mum and dad and the potential violence therein?

I agree, it is strange that there is no more solid documented evidence, but it is a bit more than a simple rumour. One guy was out shooting woodpigeon when he startled a very large cat. In hindsight he realised he had approached it down-wind and it looked shocked like it had jsut woken (there are reports of sizeable cats sunbathing in full view of people). He pulled up the gun but it was gun before he could shoot. He says he is glad that he didn't get a shot off because 12-bore game shot would probably have just pissed it off.

Remember that some people claim to have two minute long video evidence, but due to the poor quality of most home equipment and amateur camerwork it is very unclear. There is a still I found, will dig it up, quite weird to look at when you blow it up, the head looks all wrong for a domestic cat, as do the legs. Nobody has actually gone out seriously to document it, it is not worth the hassle as far as many are concerned.

A sighting every 28-35 days is not to be sniffed at. Up until ten years ago there was less than 10 minutes of footage of either the highland or the lowland gorilla (never remember which) in the whole world.

[Iain]

May I also submit this for your more trained eyes.

http://www.bigcats.org/abc/images/catrabbit.jpg

That was taken about 10 miles from where I presently live. Evidence points to that being a full-grown rabbit in its mouth (back legs fully developed or something) I'd add that the ears are very feline and the tail is quite thick and bushy. It is known locally as the ''Durham Puma''.

[Duncan Idaho]

That looks like a very large, and I mean LARGE, housecat to me. If not for the long tail, I would almost say that it looked like a lynx. The color is odd as well.

Cougars tend to look more lithe to my eyes, but maybe that is one that is very well fed.

[Beaker]

No, there shouldn't be any higher mortality for kits in that situation; they should feel the itch of wanderlust and disperse long before their parents' attitude turns from indifference to aggression. Cats rarely fight in the wild unless it can't be avoided or one of them was captive-raised and released- hence why a wild cougar with a reason to fear humans would wander into a suburb rather than stay in its original territory.

I don't doubt that there is something behind the sightings and killings, I just doubt that it's a breeding population of cougars gone native rather than a combination of escaped exotics, unusually large domestic/wild cats, and feral dogs. As for the mountain gorilla comparison, the "cloud forest" they inhabit was until recently no-man's-land to everyone except a small tribe of hunter/gatherers, with neither photographic equipment nor interest in chatting with the more technologically rich. Britain, on the other hand...

I agree with Duncan- the picture doesn't look like a cougar. A juvenile animal that would be that small in comparison to the rabbit would have entirely different proportions. I also agree that it looks like a lynx, except for the tail. Domestic cats can go up to 25-30 lbs for an unusually large male- and there are some breeds meant to get that big, such as the Maine Coon and Siberian Cat- especially with outcrosses to wild species in their background.

[Bigjake]

If you guys can hunt with bolt action, why hasn't anyone just gone out and shot the beast with a good solid bolt action rifle? around here (Ohio, USA) i don't have cougar, but a bolt action rifle would be 2nd only to a lever action in 45/70 (use enough gun! ;) ) for my choice.

[Andrew Wyatt]

At least around here, the mountain lions don't have a reputation for being very hard to kill.

a shotgun with buckshot would probably work just fine.

[H&Hhunter]

Heck guys they don't have to be bad to shoot them. Here's Ashley with his cat from last winter. We did start this cat about 50 yards from a home in Terrero NM. If most people knew how many big cats live near them every day in the rockies I think they'd be surprised.

[Iain]

I appreciate what you guys are saying and that was my first response too. Some have been shot by farmers and landowners and that is fair enough, but many probably live in areas that don't belong to anyone or are certainly never used by people for anything other than the occasional hike.

England is certainly nowhere near as big as the US and our population density is much higher, but at a guess I would say that near 50% of the population live in the south, with a much higher concentration to the south east. However there is the Surrey Puma, and you don't get more south east/London area than Surrey.

Despite all this there has never been an attack on a human, horses yes, sheep, most certainly but not actually very many. If i had to make a guess as to how many there are in Britain as of now, based on the reading I have done I would suggest the total is less than ten. They can move over large areas, often sitings appear in fits and spurts in different villages and could be attributed to the movements of just one cat covering a large area.

My interest lies in how an alien species has managed to take a hold, especially such a large one. The largest native mammal surviving in this country is the badger, a puma is just a little larger.

Duncan - I agree with you largely, it does seem lynx-ish size but the tail says it is not a lynx. The colour and the fur density are wrong for a puma. However, a species of cat called the Jungle Cat has been found as roadkill in this country. When it was found some researchers took a good look at all the kittens born in the area in the months either side. One had very clear and very distinct Jungle Cat markings.
http://www.britishbigcats.org/Images/shukjun.jpg This is the Jungle Cat that was run over in Shropshire. Despite the name they prefer woodlands and do well in agricultural areas (Shropshire is very agricultural)

What you were saying about them being more lithe got me thinking. Have you ever seen Lake Placid? A croc living in a lake in the US being fed a cow once a week by an old woman. I think it is quite possible that the people who released them, or maybe just people they adopted, have been feeding them in some areas. No reason why they wouldn't take food from a garden belonging to a cottage in the country, am sure they would overcome their shyness for a chicken or something.

[Iain]

H&H Hunter - just to be really anal, a cougar is not a big cat, it is the largest of the small cats. The leopard is the smallest of the big cats. :D

[Iain]

3 posts in a row hmmm.

Anyway, thought I would relate a funny story about a sighting. It is common knowledge in this country that in certain places a lot of marijuana gets grown illegally. We have a large landowning charity in this country that takes over stately homes, castles etc when they are sold off. The stories are that the hippies would use areas tucked away in National Trust properties to grow their gear.

They were quite used to collecting at night and being very quiet so as not to attract attention to themselves. Perfect for seeing wildlife. Many claim, after the fact, to have seen cats. They did not report at the time as it would involve some awkward explanations.

One hippy who had been using his own produce reported seeing a giant rabbit one evening. It was investigated and the result did suggest it was a large cat not a giant rabbit.

Then again there are the stories of the Scottish rabbit cats. And they are weird stories that have led to some weird corpses.

http://www.scottishbigcats.co.uk/kellas1.jpg

'' In December of 1993 a big black cat was seen swimming after wildfowl near East Kilbride. This act alone was unusual but when the keeper sent his two dogs to scare the cat away from the birds, the cat came out of the water and took on both dogs with such ferocity, that the keeper was forced to shoot the cat to protect his dogs from the attack. The cat, a female, closely resembled the Dufftown beast and it appeared a second rabbit headed cat had been discovered. ''

A very strange head, long nose, the picture is not squashed, the upper jaw protrudes over the lower jaw. Some claim this is a primitive previously undiscovered species. I suggest it is the result of jungle cats and/or wildcats mating with domestic cats and the resultant cats being large due to the effects of melanism.

[Duncan Idaho]

Have you ever seen Lake Placid?I've seen both the actual lake in upstate New York, and (much to my chagrin) the really bad movie.

Oddly enough, the idea that some eccentric person(s) might be keeping these exotic cats and occasionally releasing them to hunt - in the same fashion as a falconer - had occured to me. it does seem lynx-ish size but the tail says it is not a lynx. I should also have mentioned that the paw size is all wrong, and that the proportional distance between the ears of the cat in that picture makes that cat look like a domestic one to me. It's nothing that I can quantify scientifically, rather it is a gut-feeling on my part.

This is the Jungle Cat that was run over in Shropshire.Now we are getting somewhere.

Take a look at the picture here: http://www.wildlifeeasyst.com/jungle_cat.htm That cat looks very strikingly like a domestic cat. I confess that I have never heard of them before. Not surprising I suppose, give that there are less than 70 of them in captivity.

The hippie angle is also interesting. Lots of drug-addled losers in this country keep exotic "pets". Sometimes they do this to intimidate their drug-addled loser rivals. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to find that some British drug fiends might try to scare other dope smoking idiots off of their favorite patch by crying havoc, and letting slip the cats of war. Wouldn't surprise me either, if the plan failed because the object of the cat's charge thought they where being attacked by a rabbit. What is deeply confusing, is why the hippies didn't unleash the stopping power of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

Are they illegal to hunt with? ;)

[Duncan Idaho]

http://www.chausie.net/cattery.html

A quick search of the 'net for "jungle cat" indicates to me that breeding hybrids of these cats is not uncommon.

[H&Hhunter]

just to be really anal, a cougar is not a big cat, it is the largest of the small cats. The leopard is the smallest of the big cats.

St Johns,
Thank you sir. I did not know that.

And just for the record I spend quite a bit of time in your country as my job brings me there. I enjoy the company of your countrymen and the I find the North of England to be quite scenic. I'd love to spend some time in Scottland. Stalking of course.

H&Hhunter

[Iain]

See, my country is ok ;)

Duncan, there have been at least three confirmed roadkills of distinguishable jungle cats in the last 20 years.

The following is from a public debate held in Cornwall, the speaker is Ellis Daw, he runs the Dartmoor Wildlife Park at Sparkwell and has done for over 30 years. They have owned cougars (pumas) for two thirds of that time.

A short time after in the afternoon - this was late afternoon - my son, who was about 19 at the time, came charging into the office, shouting, "The pumas are out, the pumas are out." So we put the emergency procedure into action, and all shot out. When we got there all the pumas were there, correct. He showed me where he saw these two pumas, they'd been going up and down in the leaves at the side of the pen. There was not a sign of them. He said that he knew they were pumas, he was brought up with pumas as a lad.

There was another incident, at the back of our restaurant. We had a man and his wife who were staying with us in a caravan, whilst they worked for us. He kept a tame puma which he had brought with him. Now a puma would come into the adjacent field, over a little hedge, in the mornings, when his puma was on heat. They give quite a distinctive cry, very much like a vixen, if you've heard a vixen crying. For a period of time this male puma came into the field behind and called back and three or four people saw it. We didn't take a photograph unfortunately. Now these were positive sightings, they weren't imagining, they weren't black, they were brown pumas.

Another incident was when the police helicopter with a thermal camera detected one at the top of Bickerton. They called me out and I went up there. The area was very suitable, but there were no positive footprints because the railway company, when they had steam trains, had tipped the ashes there for over 100 years along the edge. The police showed me the heat seeking film footage taken from the helicopter. The image was extremely good and it was puma like, the way its head and small neck moved, and it shot off and I feel sure that was a puma.

[Iain]

This is a very small still from an amateur cameraman working at some distance. Quite interesting though.

http://www.ukbigcats.co.uk/images/general/amateurvideo5.jpg

[Keith]

Point 1: England is too densely populated to harbor large cats without them being sighted and identified on a daily basis. There is almost nowhere that is out of sight of a house or well traveled road. Those "natural" areas still left are literally crawling with hikers, anglers birders and bureaucrats.
Mountain lions have enormous paws designed to allow them to run on snow. Even a person totally unfamiliar with tracking would recognize such a track as something very odd indeed. And in the damp English climate even one lion would leave thousands of such tracks every day. Just about anyone would be able to identify which little patch of brush the animal was using to lie up every day from the number of tracks entering and exiting the area. After a winter snow, the tracks would stand out like a Hip Hop band at a KKK meeting!

Point 2: The "experts" identifying cat kills of domestic stock are full of it! Even in the Western US where people are quite familiar with such kills, you'll still see boneheads crawling out of the woodwork to identify a dead cow as the victim of alien "cattle mutilators". Lots of animals kill stock, but typically in settled areas it's your neighbors dog. And dogs have no instinctive kill method - the kills can resemble those of cats, bears wolves, whatever.

Point 3: Most of the photos have no scale to help separate small domestic cats from larger animals of the same configuration. Great Britain also has its own wild cat - isn't it the Scottish Wildcat? Somewhat larger than a domestic cat, but smaller than a lynx.
The photo of the cat with the rabbit is probably one of these wildcats. No doubt many of the sightings are of the same animal.

Point 4. Hoaxes. Some people just get a kick out of creating a sensation. Whether it's Loch Ness monster pictures, crop circles, or sightings of enormous felines, somebody will come along and report it or fake a picture for a laugh.

Keith

[Iain]

Point 1 - England is not that densely populated at all. There are areas of Wales and Scotland where nobody really goes all that much. See the map on the previous page. Britain's population is actually rather concentrated in certain areas, admittedly it is nowhere near as spread out as the US, but you can go missing in Northern England and Scotland if you want to. In Wales they do regular fly-overs of areas to see if people are building residences without permits, the areas are too vast and out of the way to cover otherwise.

http://www.rough-tracks.co.uk/photogallery/01-c2cl/images/view%20of%20lake%20district.jpg The Lake District

http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/scan/ben-nevis.jpg Scotland

Most people would dismiss a paw print as that of a large dog, and we do have dogs as big as cougars. There are some questions I can't answer (two days research is not a lot).

Point 2 - to a certain extent I agree. However, dogs kill as worriers rather than outright killers like cats. A pack of dogs will tear at an animal to bring it down and even start to eat it whilst it is still alive. Dog's that kill sheep over here, and there are many, tend to make a real mess of the sheep, tear it's face off, scatter bits around.

http://www.britishbigcats.org/Images/deernumberssmal_2.jpg

That is not a messy kill, in fact some claim it is absolutely characteristic of a cat kill.

Point 3 - I'd agree with the lack of scale issue. However some of the photo's just don't look like domestic cats.

http://www.scs.abelgratis.co.uk/bigcats2/assets/images/bluecatrichard2.gif

Put that into a photo editor and enlarge it. The head and the neck look very wrong for a domestic cat. I'd also suggest that it is very long in a way that leopards are.

Some sightings will be domestic cats, wildcats and dogs. However a puma has been captured from Derbyshire, a leopard cat been shot on the Isle of Wight, three Jungle Cats run over at various points and many animals that went missing from collections that shut down over the last 30 years.

Point 4 - without question there have been hoaxes.

[Dr.Rob]

The puma/catamount/mountian lion/panther are all the same animal in the US and that's why it has the Latin name Felis Concolor (cat of many colors). It's true coloration runs from grey to dusky red to tan (rather like a deer's hide) with a white underbelly. The kittens are spotted like other large cats and grow out of their spots as they age. however, spotted with the sun BEHIND them, any animal can appear "black".

Unlike a "black panther" which is a subspecies of South American jaguar (3rd largest cat in the world--Panthera Onca) the american puma is rarely "black". Up close a black jaguar still has rosettes, pumas don't.

What I'm seeing in that first still you posted of the cat carrying a rabbit is doubtless a hybrid cat. A lynx or jungle cat inbred with a domestic cat of some sort. Or maybe a jungle cat with thicker fur?

This debate about 'wild cats' in England has been going on for years. Its true that many owners simply let them go rather than "register"or destroy their animals. (You have to recall that even as late as 1900 it was considered fashionable in some circles to keep Cheetahs as pets, and train them as hunting 'dogs'.

I've seen the TV interview with a man who raises Pumas legally in England saying his females have been courted by a wild Tom on numerous occasions, but that he has not gotten a photo of the elusive animal. (Would you carry a camera 24-7 on your "ranch"?)

Now, I hunt in lion country here in Colorado. I've walked in panther tracks as big as my palm. I've seen tons of cat droppings, a few kill sites and even found hair once. I've NEVER seen a panther outside a zoo. In twenty years of quietly stalking through the woods, seeing every form of game in this state I've never seen one yet I KNOW they are here.

The puma is a reclusive critter and they tend to shy away from people. The puma stalks its prey from behind, mounting its back and crushing the vertebrae and windpipe with its teeth. Thats EXACTLY what that horse looks to have had happen to it.

National Geographic has on record an 80 pound 'runt' female puma killing a full grown moose. Even the researcher assigned to the radio collared feline was surprised. They are tough predators, equipped to kill animals much biggervthan themselves. They are also solitary.

However, its seems most FERAL cat's don't eat such big meals but survive by eating grasshoppers and other large insects, voles and field mice.

England is full of those.

England also has sparsely populated tracts of land between its remaining forests, enough to walk for several days without seeing another person.

Lynx, puma and bobcats can all share the same habitat in America, and the same is even more true in a diverse ecosystem like south eastern africa where a variety of cats coexist.

So to summarize:

You have a known history of people keeping exotic cats as pets.
You know some people let them go.
You have an ample food supply for a variety of predators.
You have a staged food supply for a variety of predators, from large to small.
You have large stretches of remote areas connecting wooded areas esp. in the North and West of England.
You have a LOT of sightings of puma sized animals, more so than can be accounted by the original animals being 'let loose"
You have a variety of dead exotics showing up on highways.
You have some wierd speciation of cats happening. (the rabbit cat, the cat in the pic with the rabbit)

Conclusions:

You have pumas in England, albiet a small breeding population. There were enough of them around to breed a second and third generation, based on the sightings. If this is not the case, your captive breeders are likely the culprits of most sightings. Are there enough individuals to maitain a breeding population? That remains to be seen.

You likely have smaller exotic cats breeding with feral housecats.

Now all you have to do is prove it.

DNA testing on the roadkill carcasses and other scientific study would take this out of the realm of myth and monsters and into wildlife biology.

If I were coming to England I'd do my hunting with a camera.


By the way, an excellent "hunting" topic.

[Iain]

Sorry if it is the wrong forum, initially did start out with hunting in mind, it has changed a bit since then. Move it if you want to, I have no objections.

I have heard it said that cats are capable of making a viable breeding population out of ridiculously low numbers. Floridean ''panthers'' show this. Some are claiming as many as fifty cats in Scotland, although I think that ridiculous. Another claim is that there are as many as twenty cougars in England. They might just make a go of it.

[p35]

I have lived in cougar country for 11 years now, and even though I have no doubt that there's at least one within a mile of me as I write this, I have never seen one. Sometimes hear them at night, and the former owner of my house saw them in the back yard. A couple years ago one was caught in the middle of town- wandered in through a greenbelt. They are very shy creatures as a rule, although attacks are on the rise. I strongly disagree with the "let's hunt them down if they show their faces" attitude. I choose to live in cougar country, and they have as much right to be here as I do. I would shoot one if it came after me or my kids, but I sure wouldn't go looking for one.

[Keith]

There are buildings in the photo's you posted, which just proves my point!

I've traveled throughout Great Britain, including Wales and Western and Northern Scotland which you consider "wild" and I would consider quite crowded. There certainly isn't anywhere where you can really get away from people. Pick up a pair of binoculars and you'll see hikers and climbers on every mountain. Look at the valleys and you'll see homes and farms lining all the bottoms.
But of course, these cats are being seen in Southern England rather than the highlands of Scotland, and the region is almost entirely developed in farms or small pasture plots for sheep and cattle. I don't think there is a place anywhere in the region where you can get out of sight of a house or road.

I will grant that cats are secretive and nocturnal creatures that aren't seen often even where they are common. But the tracks wouldn't be dismissed by even the casual observer. I'm more familiar with wolves than cats, but both animals are similar in that the tracks are larger for weight than that of domestic dogs. In other words, a 100 pound dog might have a track 3 inches across. A 100 pound wolf or lion might have a track 4 or 4 1/2 inches across - designed to spread weight on snow. You'd notice such a track and you might even think it belonged to an animal far larger than it actually is.

So, if a farmer was putzing around near the fence bordering his property and saw such tracks in the mud or snow, he would certainly take note. Even if he thought it was enormous dog running loose, he'd take note. And since cats tend to lay up in the same locale every day, there would be a plethora of tracks leading into and out of the area.

As for dog kills... Many such kills might be a case of "worrying the animal to death", but they follow no real pattern because dogs have no instinctive pattern for killing large prey. If a large dog finds an injured deer or sheep (perhaps hit by a car) it may very well grab it by the neck and kill in "cat fashion". And dogs have claws too - an animal flailing around is going to end up with claw scratches. Haven't you ever been scratched while playfully wrestling around with a large dog?

And you have to note that in these kills nobody ever seems to collect any DNA from the saliva on the bite marks. Nobody ever makes plaster casts of the tracks around the kill. Nobody ever find hairs on the sheep that belong to a lion or leopard. These "experts" aren't experts!

Keith

[Beaker]

"Viable breeding population" just means there's enough cats to reproduce without the whole population collapsing. Frankly, given genetic diversity between individuals, it's likely that at one time the viable breeding population of all cheetahs consisted of maybe two or three individuals. The reason the Florida population of cougars stays as small as it is is in large part because the adult cats keep getting killed, mostly roadkilled, not because of some ecological property keeping them from breeding more and expanding their population. (They also have low fecundity, but this is from over a century of inbreeding, which would not apply to British cats.) Again: I can see cougars surviving quite nicely in the British countryside. But unless they're on birth control pills, I can't see them surviving as legend alone for so long. I realize there are very large areas of England and Wales that are uninhabited; but the thing is, a "very large" area to a human is good enough for a few territories, no more, for cougars. And, again: while cougars include small prey in their diets and can survive on it, their natural instinct is to search for larger prey. In areas with few deer, a cougar behaving normally would then turn to livestock.

While there are dogs that as big as cougars, the tracks are really not at all difficult to distinguish from one another. Dogs have a symmetrical print that usually shows clawmarks, all felids have an asymmetrical print that usually does not. If the people doing the identifications can't distinguish between something as basic as a canid and a felid, I can't imagine they can i.d. a cougar by call or from a distance/blurry photo either. I also agree with the fellow who pointed out that there is nothing in the pictures providing scale, and disagree that a cougar has proportions so radically different from a domestic cat that they can be told without scale. Several breeds of domestic cat (Abyssinian and Traditional Siamese, to name two common ones) have long, lanky bodies, long tails, and small heads- I've got one sprawled on my computer monitor right now, and from a distance, in profile, without scale, he looks cougarish too. (The "lynxlike" cat in the other picture is almost certainly, upon further examination, a Scottish wildcat or a domestic/wildcat hybrid. The proportions, coat, color, and tail are correct.)

Wildcat and wildcat hybrid pics (http://www.scottishwildcats.co.uk/Cat_images.htm)

I've read the reports of the Surrey Puma. Frankly they're so bizarre they fit niether with an actual cougar nor with any other large cat, or in fact any animal that I'm aware of. (3'-4' tall, slitted eyes, big paws, can't jump over short fences and has to scramble over, some mutilated sheep left with a single hole in the side rather than any characteristic cat kill pattern...) The inconsistency and dramatic strangeness of the reports leads me to believe the "Surrey Puma" was mostly created from the imaginations or mischief of the locals.

I still see the escaped exotics/overblown wildcats/active imaginations possibility as far more likely than an established population of any exotic cat species. Other exotics besides the Jungle Cat, Ocelot, and Lynx/Bobcat that are popular as "pets" are the Serval and the Caracal. I don't know about Caracals, but Servals, like Jungle Cats, Bobcats, and Asian Leopard Cats, are close enough to domestic cats to create successful hybrids.

[Iain]

Keith - I agree, it's not Alaska, but if wanted to I could disappear into Scotland.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/library/images/sa01-g05.gif

http://ite.pubs.informs.org/submissions/example/la1.gif

The sightings are by no means exclusive to south east England. Many are in the south-west on moors where people die of exposure fairly regularly, and certainly get lost. Scotland has significant sightings, up to one a month.

http://www.scottishbigcats.co.uk/catshome.htm

As for the surrey puma, I agree a lot of the stories start with ''On the way home from the pub''.

Hybrids - I accept the distinct possibility, but as drjoe pointed out there is no reason for there not to be both.

Have a look again at the statement from the owner of the animal park posted on page two.

[Beaker]

It appears this HAS been investigated formally by actual experts.

Paper trail (http://www.bigcats.org/ncj/hoaxhoaxhoax.html)

Edit: I'd also like to point out that I live in one of those counties marked on the U.S. map as 7 people per sq km or less. In my area, cougars haven't been hunted for more than fifty years, because half the land is DOE property and the other half is national park. The cats know this, and cougar sightings are quite common despite the low population density. I come across their tracks when I go hiking, we have an acquaintance who had one take up residence in his yard when she was in heat, and my significant other has had them run in front of his car on the way to work twice.

Edit again: Natural History Museum's online exhibit on the subject (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/interactive/science-casebooks/bm/bm_01.htm)

[Iain]

The skull is a hoax.

An actual expert said the following

A short time after in the afternoon - this was late afternoon - my son, who was about 19 at the time, came charging into the office, shouting, "The pumas are out, the pumas are out." So we put the emergency procedure into action, and all shot out. When we got there all the pumas were there, correct. He showed me where he saw these two pumas, they'd been going up and down in the leaves at the side of the pen. There was not a sign of them. He said that he knew they were pumas, he was brought up with pumas as a lad.

There was another incident, at the back of our restaurant. We had a man and his wife who were staying with us in a caravan, whilst they worked for us. He kept a tame puma which he had brought with him. Now a puma would come into the adjacent field, over a little hedge, in the mornings, when his puma was on heat. They give quite a distinctive cry, very much like a vixen, if you've heard a vixen crying. For a period of time this male puma came into the field behind and called back and three or four people saw it. We didn't take a photograph unfortunately. Now these were positive sightings, they weren't imagining, they weren't black, they were brown pumas.

Another incident was when the police helicopter with a thermal camera detected one at the top of Bickerton. They called me out and I went up there. The area was very suitable, but there were no positive footprints because the railway company, when they had steam trains, had tipped the ashes there for over 100 years along the edge. The police showed me the heat seeking film footage taken from the helicopter. The image was extremely good and it was puma like, the way its head and small neck moved, and it shot off and I feel sure that was a puma.

Also in the ''paper trail'' link there was this

Probably the greatest living expert on the subject is Nigel Brierly, a retired biologist who lives on the Soutern fringes of Exmoor and has spent years collecting evidence. His 80- page paperback, They Stalk by Night, published in 1989, gives the fullest account of the phenomenon to date. The subtitle of his booklet, The Big Cats of Exmoor and the Southwest, reflects his belief that the sheep-killers are not, as some people have claimed, large dogs. Everything about them is feline, from their round heads, small ears, green eyes and long tails to their method of killing which is to stalk and spring without any of the preliminary coursing practised by dogs.

[Iain]

http://alumni.swan.ac.uk/news/news_item.asp?news_id=288

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/10_october/21/taro9_cats.shtml

Claw marks can be found on the head and shoulders and the neck is often bereft of meat. In the case of smaller prey some are decapitated whilst lambs may be completely devoured except for their hoofs. Sheep have been found lying on their side, some with ears missing and the rib-cage_ exposed and picked clean. Sometimes innards are eaten but in other cases shoulders are ripped and the scene is usually bereft of blood spill. Rib-cages are usually ‘rasped’ and up to 70 lb of meat has been taken from local goat kills from http://www.tudor34.freeserve.co.uk/KentBigCatResearch2.htm

[Keith]

St. John,

Nobody could disappear in Scotland unless they crawled into a patch of heather and simply stayed there. The area is simply too open and has too many hikers, anglers, birders, etc. It's as if you could tuck 10 people per square mile into the open ranges of Wyoming and then argue that they'd never see each other.

In southwest England it's far more crowded than Scotland, and the reasoning becomes even more strained.

And again - think of the tracks! A large cat can remain unknown in the rocky terrain at the edge of a large city like Denver - and they do - people can and do live within a few hundred yards of a lion and never know it because the animal leaves no tracks in such a place. But in the muddy fields and pastures of southern England it becomes an entirely different matter. You simply couldn't overlook the tens of thousands of 4 1/2 inch wide tracks that such an animal would leave every week. You'd see them everywhere and they'd all lead back to some patch of scrub where the animal lies up every day.

If the animals actually existed, some guy familiar with the species (our own Art, perhaps!) would pop on over and track it down and make a million on the subsequent book deal.

It's a myth just like Sasquatch or the Loch Ness monster. We all enjoy a good story, but...

Keith

[Beaker]

"Expert" is a relative term. I note they never reference if the guy is an expert on large cats, or just an "expert" in the sense that he's collected the most documentation to support the pro-beast position. Piltdown man had its scientific supporters, too.

As for Keith's suggestion of a tracker, according to a British friend of mine, there was a recent BBC documentary of a man who normally makes his living tracking big cats (mainly tigers) who was called in to investigate. He went up hill and down dale over half of England without ever finding any evidence of big cats in the area. And to an experienced eye, they DO leave evidence. The average person may not recognize that there are cats in their area, but to a practiced eye their presence stands out like a neon sign.

One of the believer testimonials that really stuck out for me was the chances of encountering a cat in a "10 square mile wasteland". Normal sized territory for a big cat is more like fifty square miles; one cat wouldn't be inclined to stay in an area that small, much less several.

[Iain]

Beaker, the ''actual expert'' I referred to owns and runs an animal park in Cornwall, he has kept puma's for over twenty years. I included the link to the source of that statement earlier in the thread.

To quote Dr. Rob

So to summarize:
You have a known history of people keeping exotic cats as pets.
You know some people let them go.
You have an ample food supply for a variety of predators.
You have a staged food supply for a variety of predators, from large to small.
You have large stretches of remote areas connecting wooded areas esp. in the North and West of England.
You have a LOT of sightings of puma sized animals, more so than can be accounted by the original animals being 'let loose"
You have a variety of dead exotics showing up on highways.
You have some wierd speciation of cats happening. (the rabbit cat, the cat in the pic with the rabbit)
Conclusions:
You have pumas in England, albiet a small breeding population. There were enough of them around to breed a second and third generation, based on the sightings. If this is not the case, your captive breeders are likely the culprits of most sightings. Are there enough individuals to maitain a breeding population? That remains to be seen.
You likely have smaller exotic cats breeding with feral housecats.

I didn't see the programme you are referring to. Will take a look around. This is not my field of interest, this whole thread is the result of two days research, the possible evidence is abundant, sifting through it is harder.

[Keith]

Mystery Solved:

http://www.bigcats.org/swc/kellas2.html

http://www.bigcats.org/swc/wildcat1.html

http://www.bigcats.org/swc/blackbeast.html

http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/abc108.htm

[Iain]

How does that solve it?

There are/have been unquestionably leopard cats and jungle cats abroad in the English countryside. They are quite likely to have interbred with domestic cats and maybe even wildcats. See earlier in the thread.

Melanistic wildcats I had heard of quite a while ago, they are reasonably big. There is also the Kellas cat which I posted a picture of earlier and was mentioned in the links.

However, some reputable people, like the one quoted in my previous post or two, claim to have seen puma's. No reason why both could not be out there.

[Dr.Rob]

Granted, Keith I'm no expert but there have been sightings of pumas by people who know what pumas look like.

I don't need some reknowned pipe smoking big game hunter from India to tell me there are no Tigers in the wilds of England .:D

As I recall, some reknowned pipe smoking big game hunter name Marduke or something faked a nessie sighting/tracks with a stuffed hippo foot.

There are experts and there are experts, right?

I'm not as convinced about pumas in England as I am with jaguars in Arizona, but there is still some compelling evidence.

Worth a look, or a lively discussion.

This was covered on "Arthur C Clarke's mysterious world" and he reached the conclusion its probably pumas that managed to survive, unlike the cheetahs and other large cats let loose.

[Iain]

jaguars in Arizona,

The third largest cat wandering around Arizona?

You guys have any other interesting ''alien'' wild species?

I can add wallabies, garter snakes to the list of aliens in the UK. The wallabies are proven, but their numbers are not healthy, the group took a big hit in a cold winter we had a few years back.

[Art Eatman]

Mountain lions also occasionally show up with beaucoup malanin. A very, very dark brown. We've had quite a few such sighted in the Terlingua area.

I've seen two lions in all my years of meddling around in back country. I've seen the tracks of several dozen. Since there's a momma lion living just a half-mile or so from my house, and since I see lion tracks of various sizes around my place, I have to assume that they can learn to live near to people, provided there's some sort of food supply.

One thing for sure, a five- to seven-inch diameter paw print is hard to mistake. :)

Art

[Keith]

Well, if you follow the links I provided you'll see some native British cats that will do nicely to explain any puma sightings.

The Scottish wildcat is known to exceed 48 inches in length and the coloring is muted enough to look like a puma in the right light.
This new cat they've dubbed the Kellas cat is apparently a hybrid of wildcat and domestics. It's black, has an elongated head and odd ears that bend at the tips like a Lynx - and it's as big or bigger than the wildcats!

These critters aren't conjecture, they're actual animals that have been captured, shot, weighed, measured, etc. Something like a dozen of these Kellas cats have been killed and shipped to museums in the last ten years and the Scottish wildcat has always been around.

I can certainly understand why someone would mistake such a cat for an even bigger cat. If you saw a four foot long black cat with tasseled ears crossing a field at dawn, you'd probably think you were seeing some sort of leopard and might easily think it was six feet long instead of four feet long.

Hell, just look at this thing: http://www.bigcats.org/swc/kellas1.html

[Iain]

I agree with most of that, and up until I started this research yesterday I would have agreed. The Kellas cat is a fascinating one, did you see the exercept I posted about one taking on two dogs a fight? Apparently it has half the cranial capacity relative to body size than a domestic does. Di Francis (mentioned in your links) is adamant that it is a separate ''primitive'' species. Apparently they are vicious gits.

I would have agreed, until the evidence of the zoo owner swayed me over to the puma argument. His son saw pumas (after being raised around them) hanging around the puma cage at his zoo. A friend of his who as a tame she-puma had a male in a neighbouring field ''courting'' her when she was on heat.

I want concrete proof, there is concrete proof for the wildcat/leopard cat/jungle cat hypothesis, the puma is presently witnessed but not proven. Until it is I remain to a degree sceptical but open to the possibility, very open in fact.

Art - you said lions, do you mean African lions? Or is this a case of confusing identification names and you mean puma/cougar/mountain lion?

[Keith]

Well, I'm certainly not an expert on cougars! However, I'll go back to the point I keep trying to make to you about the tracks - if such animals were running around in the muddy pastures of England, there would be thousands of clear tracks to examine and without a doubt many hundreds of these would be cast in plaster and passed around to be examined by anyone interested. Animal tracks are quite distinctive and any reasonably knowledgeable person can distinguish one from another. An expert could probably tell you the precise species, weight and perhaps even the sex of the animal!

As an example; a fox track in the snow can be distinguished from a small dog from fifty feet away, just because the tracks are in line rather than staggered - and those animals are related. Nobody who knew a thing about it could be confused between a dog and a cougar!

I would think that since a cougar track is "large for size" and a cougar can weigh 150 pounds, you'd need a 200 or 250 pound dog to even mimic the size of the track, much less the shape, gait, claw marks, etc.
Perhaps one of our members more familiar with cougars and their tracks can comment here?

Anyway, if there were big cats in England, there would be lots of big cat tracks in plaster to show. Hell, even Bigfoot leaves tracks!

Keith

[Beaker]

*shrug* I reiterate yet again that I have little doubt there have been some exotic pet escapees, up to and including cougars.

I persist in my skepticism that they have established a breeding population in the wild, because the sightings, lack of tracks, lack of remains, and lack of photographic evidence that is NOT a domestic cat or wildcat do not fit with what I know about cougars. These animals do not behave like cougars who are not being and have not been hunted for a long time- which are much less shy and elusive than the cougars in areas where they face real pressure from humans. They do not breed like or establish large territories like cougars. They do not disperse like cougars. (Females in heat screech like women being murdered. Hard to believe no one could track her down, or at least find prints, during her season.) Large cats do not exist like ghosts upon the land; why would the Ministry of Agriculture spend that much time and money on a coverup? Because Keith is right- they WOULD be leaving tracks all over the place on that kind of terrain, and cougar tracks don't look much like dog or large wildcat tracks unless you don't have a basis for comparison.

I retain my opinion because the evidence isn't enough to overcome the evidence that shows itself in its absence- that which we know about how big cats behave.

[Iain]

http://www.britishbigcats.org/Print_2BBCS.jpg

http://www.forteantimes.co.uk/articles/121/cat3.gif


What do you think of those? Real?

The British Big Cat Society today released details of big cat sightings reported through it during 2001. The staggering figure of 438 (sightings or incidents) clearly indicates that there are 'many' Big Cats currently roaming Britain.
Altogether there were in fact over 500 sightings reported to the society - but 105 of those were reports from previous years. (543 in total)
Scotland was again the 'hot spot'- with 85 reports, then Wales with 72, Leicestershire 63, Gloucestershire 58, Norfolk 45, Cambridgeshire 23, Suffolk 15, Devon 10, Yorkshire 8 and Cornwall 7.
The society had reports in 31 counties these included an attack on a horse in Devon and a rather unique sighting from 6 people at the same time - which reported a PUMA 'sunbathing' for several hours in Wiltshire.

[Art Eatman]

St Johns, I've only referred to the U.S. mountain lion. Like I said before, a lot of us in Texas simply call them "lions". :)

Find yourself an area with a sandy loam soil. It holds tracks pretty well. Hang some rags soaked in bacon grease. Scatter some catnip around.

Check daily for tracks. If you see cat tracks you can barely cover with your open hand, you'll have a pretty good idea as to who came by! A typical female's pawprint is as big as the width of your fist.

Territory? Open-country lions are known to range a five- to ten-mile circle in a night's hunt. The Texas Parks & Wildlife biologists estimate a breeding pair's common territory to be as much as 10 to 20 miles in diameter. (There was a big "Oops!" over this after a trapping program in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park. They expected to find maybe two or three pairs. Nope. 22 lions in all. But, lots of deer and javelina in that area.)

As a generality, a mountain lion will kill a deer per week, if available.

A friend of mine flies for wildlife researchers. One radio-collared lion's territory wasn't much from east to west, but ranged some 200 miles, north to south. That cat, a mature male, ranged from the Glass Mountains north of Marathon, Texas, to way down in the Sierra Del Carmen in Mexico.

To digress: My firend's record "chase" was of a Peregrine falcon. It all started in Saskatchewan; southward to the coast of south Texas; and thence to South America. East across Brazil, and then off across the Atlantic, where a Cessna 172 is rather limited. :) The bird was then picked up on radio in Africa. Go figure.

:), Art