All Those "Big Cat" Flaps are Nonsense

From The Guardian comes this little missive about the nonsense claim that that there are "Big Cats" rolling around the manicured, plowed and hound-besotted English countryside:

There is scarcely a self-respecting borough in Britain which does not now possess a Beast. Even the London suburbs claim to be infested with big cats: there is a Beast of Barnet, Beast of Cricklewood, a Crystal Palace Puma,a Sydenham Panther. There have been occasional reports of mysterious British cats throughout history, but over the past few years the sightings have boomed.

In her book Mystery Big Cats, Merrily Harpur finds that "cat-flaps", as she calls them, are occurring at the rate of 2,000 to 4,000 a year. Harpur notes that around three-quarters of all the cats reported are black, and they are commonly described as glossy and muscular. She also makes the fascinating observation that while the most likely candidate is a melanistic leopard (the leopard is the species in which the black form, though rare, occurs most often) she has not been able to find a single account of an ordinary, spotted leopard seen in the wild in Britain.

....Yet, despite camera traps deployed in likely places throughout Britain, despite the best efforts of hundreds of enthusiasts armed with long lenses and thermal imaging equipment, we have yet to see a single unequivocal image captured in this country. Of the photographs and fragments of footage I have seen, around half are evidently domestic cats. Roughly a quarter are cardboard cut-outs, cuddly toys, the result of crude Photoshopping or – as the surrounding vegetation reveals – pictures taken in the tropics. The remainder are so distant and indistinct that they could be anything: dogs, deer, foxes, bin liners, yetis on all fours.

Nor have the tireless efforts to catch or kill these animals yielded anything more convincing. The hundreds of traps set for big cats in Britain have caught only two large predators. One, in 1980, was a tame puma, which had been released by a man about to be sent to prison. The other was a cryptozoologist called Pete Bailey, who had spent 15 years hunting the Beast of Exmoor, entered one of his traps to change the bait and accidentally tripped the mechanism. He was stuck there for two nights, eating the raw meat he had set for the cat, before he was rescued. We hunt the Beast, but the Beast is us....

...In 1995 the government sent investigators to Bodmin moor in Cornwall, where the evidence for big cats was said to be strongest. They spent six months in the field. There is something of the 19th-century royal commission about this investigation. The report contains photos of a strapping fellow with a large moustache and a measuring pole, demonstrating the heights of the natural features on which the creatures were photographed. The text reads in places like the final chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is thorough, exhaustive, and devastating to those who argued that, while other reputed big cats might not exist, the Beast of Bodmin was real.

They examined the famous video sequence, broadcast widely on television, which shows a cat leaping cleanly over a drystone wall. It looks impressive, until you see the man from the ministry standing beside the wall with his pole, and realise that the barrier is knee-high. A monstrous cat sitting on a gatepost shrinks, when the pole arrives, from a yard at the shoulder to a foot. In one case, where the Beast was filmed crossing a field, the investigators brought a black domestic cat to the scene, set it down in the same spot and photographed it from where the video had been taken. The moggie looks slightly bigger than the monster.

The investigators compared a chilling nocturnal close-up of the Beast with a picture of a real black leopard, and spotted an obvious but hitherto-unnoticed problem. The panther in the cage, like all big cats, has round pupils, while the creature in the photograph has vertical slits, a feature confined to smaller species, such as the domestic cat....

Could it be that illusory big cats also answer an unmet need? As our lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and diversity of nature has declined, could these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?

Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories that must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.

If all of this sounds a bit like something you have read on this blog in the past, that might because you remember a 2005 post entitled The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense.  And, as the links below suggest, it's a topic I have revisited a few time since then. 

The bottom line is that America has vast tracts of forest and a large number of true big predators that are breaking out of the InterMountain West with extraordinary rapidity, while the UK is an island will small woods that shot out its last large predator around 1750.  There are very few Scottish Wildcats left in the U.K. (most are in captivity on an island in the Hebrides), and this animal is only a big larger than the average house cat. A few feral imported pet Savannah cats from Africa may be occasionally released by tired pet owners in the U.K., but again this is an animal that is only a big larger than the average house cat, and most are soon dead from dogs and gun; there are no long-term breeding populations. 

What the British are looking for is something they lost with over-population and poor game management:  a last bit of the wild, something a little wilder, something approaching true wilderness. 

That is gone, and it's not coming back. 

Let that be a warning to all of us in America.  Rising human population numbers serve no one who loves the land, the woods, the forests and the streams.  If we do not want wolves and wilderness to be but a memory, we have to  have a national discussion about population numbers.  We cannot grow on like this forever.

• Related Posts:
  ** Connecticut Mountain Lion Was a Wild Animal
  ** Wild Cougar Shot in Chicago 
  ** P.T. Barnum and the Beastiaries of the Imagination
  ** The Beast of Exmoor and Other Nonsense
  ** The Lion of Dartmoor
  ** Kentucky Big Cat Claims are Bogus
  ** Hear Hooves? Don't Assume Zebra!
  ** The U.S. Now Has More Lions Than Africa
  ** Big Cat Sighting in the UK Proves REAL
  ** Central Park Coyote - New York City 

.