CRYPTOZOOLOGY

The people who 'know' there are big cats in Britain

Jack Rear
Wed, 23 August 2023

Rick Minter at Thistledown with one of his props – a sandy brown resin puma - Sam Pelly

“Big cat ate my dog!”, “Black PANTHER on loose in Brit county – people urged ‘STAY AWAY’”, “Big cats terrorising Britain for 20 years!” Whether you choose to believe these headlines – all recorded in the past five years – or not, Britain loves its beast sightings. It’s no wonder that the “best photo ever” of a black panther in the British countryside caused a stir.

The image, which features in a new Amazon Prime documentary, Panthera Britannia Declassified, was found in the archives of a centre for zoology, along with a handwritten note saying it was taken near Ford Green Nature Reserve in Staffordshire. Its discoverer, Carl Marshall, describes it as unambiguously “a large cat of the Panthera genus”, adding: “If it’s genuine, then it’s probably the best photo of a British big cat that exists.”

It was in 1978 when the “Beast of Bodmin” hit the headlines, sparking a wave of similar sightings of big cats around Britain. The fascination has only grown. As recently as January 2023, a black panther was allegedly spotted in Wendover Woods, Buckinghamshire. Last autumn, a video purported to show a large black cat devouring a sheep in a Derbyshire field, shortly after a camper said he recorded a leopard outside his tent in the Peak District. Even the BBC presenter Clare Balding once claimed to have seen an “enormous” predator while recording her BBC Radio 4 programme Ramblings near Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.

The ‘Beast of Bodmin’, pictured in 2008 in Cornwall - Shutterstock

Almost every culture around the globe has its own “beast” narrative, and, in the modern world, where all answers are just a few keystrokes away, it’s charming to think there might be some mystery left out there.

“There’s a fascination with monsters,” says tracker and naturalist Rhoda Watkins, another of the documentary’s contributors. “We evolved in response to having large predators and in places where that threat isn’t so real, I think we need to feed that gap.

“But while I do think we’re primed to be fascinated by monsters, having spent time tracking and having spoken to credible witnesses, I have no doubts that there are big cats in Britain.”

The British Big Cats Society receives reports of between 300 and 500 sightings per year. “About 75 per cent of big cat sightings are of melanistic leopards [black panthers], 20 per cent are of pumas and probably five per cent are of lynx,” says environmental consultant Rick Minter.

A self-described “knower, not a believer”, Minter is the authority on British big cats; author of Big Cats: Facing Britain’s Wild Predators, and host of the Big Cat Conversations podcast.

The photo of what looks like a black panther, said to be the best photo of a British big cat that exists - Dragonfly Films/SWNS

Minter hadn’t given the idea any thought until, gazing out of the window at a Cumbrian hotel 20 years ago, he saw a black creature walk across the field, around 100 metres away. “I assumed it was a dog, then I realised its elongated body and long tail were cat-like. I found myself rapidly thinking of alternatives to it being a black panther, but drew a blank.”

Though his family offered “heartfelt” resistance and advised him to stick with an “orthodox” professional life in countryside management policy, Minter dived into the rabbit hole.

To Minter, the evidence is compelling. “It’s not just people seeing things; it’s people hearing things, it’s experiential things,” he explains. “Around 20 per cent of the reports I record involve usually a dog or a horse which reacts to something before the witness sees it.”

Reports from people who aren’t in any way animal experts, says Minter, are “remarkably consistent” with big cat behaviour – the way the animals move, zig-zagging down hills, warming themselves in the sun. “At one property I visited, they had sightings and then a deer carcass turned up,” he says. “The groundskeeper witnessed the animal rolling on the compost heap where he rakes all the deer droppings. The cat was masking itself in the scent of the prey, which is something they do in their native countries.”

There is stigma around the subject. Minter pre-emptively apologises for being “defensive”; he has been branded a conspiracy theorist in the past. “You can be a bore if you’re not careful,” he worries. “If you’re shrill about it, you can’t be influential.”

And many sightings are wildly hopeful – such as the recent, hysterical reports of a lioness in Berlin that turned out to be a common wild pig. “I’d say 95 per cent of the reports, tracks and sightings I get sent are clearly not big cats,” says Watkins. “In 20 years, I can count on one hand the evidence that I can unequivocally say, with scientific analysis, is a big cat.”

The experts are familiar with all the sceptical questions that surround their research. Foremost is where these animals come from. Black panthers are native to Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia. Mountain lions or pumas are from Central and South America. Lynx have long since been hunted to extinction in Britain but now range from France to Siberia. How could any of them be roaming Britain?

“People forget that until the Dangerous Wild Animals Act came into force in 1976, these cats were popular pets,” says Watkins. “You could buy lion cubs from Harrods. We know from archive footage that when you started needing a permit, people released them.”

There have been other such “release events”. When Britain was at war and meat was scarce, zoo and circus keepers would have struggled to feed cats, while The Zoos Act in 1981 clamped down on poorly kept wildlife parks and zoos. These may have meant pumas and leopards were released into the wild.

Big cats have a lifespan of 10-15 years, so both Watkins and Minter are confident that Britain hosts breeding populations. “The numbers you’d need to sustain a genetically viable population would be about 300,” says Minter. Watkins says “hundreds” would be at the upper end of her estimations.

But if big cats are wandering around Britain, why haven’t we seen them? Why is so much British big-cat footage still grainy photos or shaky videos? “There are an estimated 3,000 pumas in Colorado but most people never see one,” Minter replies. “These are elusive animals. It’s very rare to get clear footage. The stuff on David Attenborough documentaries takes dedicated teams years to shoot. Also, these animals are most active at dawn and dusk when the lighting isn’t great for recording.


“A lot of people are too busy working out what they’re seeing to get their camera out. By the time they understand the significance, it’s gone. I’ve had people explain they were too scared to reach for their phone if they were up close, so the best footage comes from a distance for that reason. As cameras improve and more people use things like dashcams regularly, I think we’ll see more.”

Watkins compares the situation to that of British otters, of which there are thought to be around 11,000 in Britain. “We know they’re out there, but most of us have never seen one.”

Minter also claims there is “more footage out there than people realise”. Much of it, he says, doesn’t make the press because landowners don’t want the public roaming their land, looking for big cats. “Others become protective of them,” he says. “They swear me to secrecy before they show me footage because they worry that someone will threaten ‘their’ panther.”

The story of the Berlin lioness frustrated big-cat enthusiasts because shaky evidence was treated as incontrovertible and brought the subject in for ridicule.

But if all this is real, surely at some point there will be too much evidence to deny their existence? Then, finally, Britain’s black panthers will have to step out of the shadows.