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I'm with you Ivan. It's all just too unlikely. There are no pics as you say, not even of tracks. No farmers complaining about loss of livestock (big cat hunts would soon ensue not to mention the front page of the Daily Mail). Maybe a few were released a long time ago but there certainly could be no breeding population. Most land in Britain is too heavily used for no-one to have found any concrete evidence beyond the odd story about vanishing hind quarters with a longer than usual tail attached. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, even if the testimony does come from the big man himself :)
 
My goodness I'm surprised to see this thread here. I have a little bit of a tall tale to tell myself.

While walking the Speyside way this year I saw the oddest thing in the distance. It was the biggest black cat I've ever seen in my whole life skulking through the stubble of a corn field. It was difficult to gauge size without any good points of perspective but this thing looked about as big as a golden retriever. It must have spotted me because it made a beeline for a plantation of spruce trees and dissapeared from view.

This was in wildcat country so I wouldn't discount a wilcat crossbreed with a slight size illusion created by poor perspective, but I wasn't going to be entering the plantation for love nor money.

Leopards and panthers/jaguars are well known for being elusive so it's quite feasable a small breeding population can exist undetected in the more remote parts of the country. The thing that makes me doubt it is the lack of livestock attacks. A big cat in Britain would surely take easy prey like sheep in an enclosure very regularly....unless they have developed a very strong aversion to humans.

Interesting!
 
zarkwon said:
There are no pics as you say, not even of tracks. No farmers complaining about loss of livestock (big cat hunts would soon ensue not to mention the front page of the Daily Mail).
Click to expand...

Plenty of both. Farmers are always complaining about loss of livestock.
 
JonathanD said:
Plenty of both. Farmers are always complaining about loss of livestock.
Click to expand...
To big cats? Are there investigative reports on analysis of the carcasses? Surely the remains of said livestock must be found quite often and it must be a straightforward process to establish a feline kill. If it happens all the time I'm surprised we don't hear more about it, that farmers don't trap/hunt them and that we don't find their remains in the wild.
 
some years back there was a program on the telly about wild cats living on dartmoor i think it was, the bloke who was looking for the cats was a hunter, he had said there where 2 sorts, a very large black beast and another lighter brown/grey colour animal not so big, i think it might have been on BBC 1 maybe, anyway the bloke had a film crew with him for some time to try and catch a picture or film, they did and it was no normal cat. the bloke ran for some time to reach an open gateway to take a shot with his rifle, due to no back stop and it being a powerful full bore rifle the shot was not taken, the film crew got it on film. i think it was mid to late 90's maybe, it might have been called the beast of bodmin or some sort of thing like that...

anyway it is on film footage, i cant find it though....
 
It occured to me today that there's a big ecological niche left open by the abscence of large predators like wolves in the UK. Given the right circumstances evolution can speed up to quite remarkable rates. With a burgeoning deer population a cat large enough to take young fawns as prey would have a huge evolutionary advantage over it's smaller contempraries.

One (rediculously) oversized domestic/wildcat crossbreed tom would be able to claim a huge territory and breed with a great many females. Given the fact that there hasn't been any large predators here for a good few hundred years, that's ample time for such a minor evolutionary change to take place.

These 'big cat' sightings may be the evidence of the development of a new large predator in the UK. Elusiveness and shyness towards humans would be an obvious characteristic of such an animal existing in a densely populated country. Just an idea I had over breakfast, but I thought it might interest people here.

Any thoughts on my own sighting up in the Cairngorms?
 
I used to live in rural Aberdeenshire (real farming country plus heavily wooded areas) and my wife and I saw large black cats on a regular basis. This varied from crossing the road in front of the car at night or early morning, to walking boldly past the local nursing home in broad daylight.
My best sighting was this large black panther checking out rabbit holes in a line of gorse about 200m away. The tail swished and moved, and was held like a large cat and not a domestic. It was pure black with huge shoulder muscles. I watched it through my monocular for about 5 minutes before it went through a gap in the gorse and walked off down a field. I was just glad my dogs didn't see it. That might have been one cat chase that would not have ended well!

Not far from that sighting location, and about 400m higher, I came across prints in the snow later that year. These were cat prints (no nails) and I have a photo somewhere with my Nokia phone next to it for scale. These prints did not belong to a domestic cat. I'll see if I can dig them out.

A friend of mine owns a trout fishery in Aberdeenshire and has seen a panther many times. Walking back to his car at dusk one night, along the path that has a stream on one side and the loch on the other, he became aware of being watched. Across the stream, walking at the same pace was what he described as "a big black cat, like the one in Jungle Book". He made it to the car!

Months later, an angler in a boat on the loch was talking to the owner and pointed out that there was a very large cat across the stream and was the owner aware of it. All the owner said was "oh, he's back then"! The angler refused to get out of the boat for another hour or so!

There are many stories like this, all from reliable people. Like the one that was shot in the 50s and laid on a hay bale. The bail was just big enough to take the body, but the head and tail flopped off both sides...

Whether you believe any of this or not is up to you, but I can only report what I have seen or heard from people that I know would not make stuff up.

All I can say is that it is one of the prettiest large cats I have ever seen. My wife and I were in Dallas a few years back and went to the Dallas World Aquarium. We stopped dead in our tracks and looked at each other when we came to the panther enclosure. My wife just said "that look familiar babe?"

Cheers
 
Earlier in the year, I drove along a B road near Wellington, past a T-junction with a smaller lane. As I drove past the junction, I caught a quick glimpse of what I was certain was a black panther sitting about 10 yards down the side lane. I pulled up a bit sharpish and reversed back, and still there, sitting contentedly in the sunshine, was - a bog-standard black domestic moggy. The lane sloped down at a steep angle and also widened out a fair bit, so the perspective was a bit odd. That's my excuse anyway, and I'm sticking to it! But if the moggy had scarpered while I was stopping and reversing back, I'd have forever after sworn blind that I'd seen a panther.
 
lannyman8 said:
some years back there was a program on the telly about wild cats living on dartmoor i think it was, the bloke who was looking for the cats was a hunter, he had said there where 2 sorts, a very large black beast and another lighter brown/grey colour animal not so big, i think it might have been on BBC 1 maybe, anyway the bloke had a film crew with him for some time to try and catch a picture or film, they did and it was no normal cat. the bloke ran for some time to reach an open gateway to take a shot with his rifle, due to no back stop and it being a powerful full bore rifle the shot was not taken, the film crew got it on film. i think it was mid to late 90's maybe, it might have been called the beast of bodmin or some sort of thing like that...

anyway it is on film footage, i cant find it though....
Click to expand...


I remember watching the same program, if I remember correct the hunter also had some hand guns to chase the allusive critters down with
 
Soundmixer said:
...My best sighting was this large black panther checking out rabbit holes in a line of gorse about 200m away. The tail swished and moved, and was held like a large cat and not a domestic. It was pure black with huge shoulder muscles. I watched it through my monocular for about 5 minutes before it went through a gap in the gorse and walked off down a field. I was just glad my dogs didn't see it. That might have been one cat chase that would not have ended well!...
Click to expand...

Not neccessarilly Cougar hunting here often is done by treeing then with dogs.
 
my buddy and myself were out hill walking yesterday and we couldn’t agree with each other over what was valid evidence he mentioned a large cat skull found down south some 20 odd years ago but I just poo pooed it as a possible hoax but even I think it is certainly plausible.
PS the mountain hare’s are beginning to turn white .
 
salad said:
I remember watching the same program, if I remember correct the hunter also had some hand guns to chase the allusive critters down with
Click to expand...

it was a 6 shot revolver used to dispatch deer if not dead from the rifle shot, a .45 i think, he loaded it with 3 rounds before he looked up a drainage pipe like the picture shown earlier in this thread.

all i can say is yes maybe very rare that they are breading, but they must be out there, just my thoughts though...:)
 
lannyman8 said:
it was a 6 shot revolver used to dispatch deer if not dead from the rifle shot, a .45 i think, he loaded it with 3 rounds before he looked up a drainage pipe like the picture shown earlier in this thread.

all i can say is yes maybe very rare that they are breading, but they must be out there, just my thoughts though...:)
Click to expand...
It wasn't Danny Nineham was it?
 
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