Big Cats Loose in Wessex
Abstract
© 2002, Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
Big Cats Loose in Wessex
Marcus Matthews writes (5 September 2002): Thank you very much for the use of the AskWhy! website to appeal for information about big cats. I am currently editing the manuscript and have found a possible publisher. I enclose three cuttings on the cats and photos of one of our sheep, Dorset Poll, which died or was killed at Brixton Deverill. Warminster in July 2002. The sheep lost its front leg and was eaten on the shoulder, neck and face. Some geese were killed at Hill Deverill at about the same time. The big cats have been seen at Battlebury woods and at Westbury, according to the cuttings. The British Big Cats Researh Society, Exotic Animals Register, Animals and Men and Fortean Times all continue to receive reports.
I am happy for my telephone number to be included on your website to receive any reports that local people might have. (Matthew now says he has enough material.)
Marcus Matthews
Maureen Pickup was reported in the Western Daily Press as coming to a short tail back while driving home one evening. She saw that about 10 cars had slowed down to take a good look at a dead or unconscious cat by the roadside as they crawled by. Maureen recognized it as a cat, having spent time in Africa, but it was six feet long! The cat must have revived because no dead panther was reported and no other reports of it cam in.
Colonel Conrad Freeman wrote to the Warminster Journal that he had been exercising his schnauzer in woodland below Battlebury Hill when he caught site of a large mottled animal like a leopard or panther, bigger than an Alsatian. The dog raised a ruckus barking but the animal seemed unimpressed. The colonel says he has seen men in India ripped apart by cats that big, so considered himself lucky.
Exotic Animals
Animals sighted in Britain include black panthers (melanistic leopards), jaguars, snow leopards, pumas, Euopean lynxes, American lynxes, Caracal lynxes, ocelots, jungle cats, golden cats and leopard cats. There have also been reports of timber wolves, coyotes, wolverines, racoons, lemurs, apes and monkeys.
Britain has a long history and folklore of exotic animals going back to the Romans. The Romans were fond of circuses and kept exotic animals for them. They had circuses at London, Cirencester and Colchester. Among the animals they kept were lions, tigers, wolves, leopards, and elephants. The legions also often wore the skins of big cats over their uniforms and kept live animals as mascots.
From the Elizabethan period until the nineteenth century, there were private menageries and travelling circuses around Britain. In Wiltshire, there were private menageries at Bowood House, near Chippenham, Longleat House, near Warminster, and Wilton House, near Salisbury. There were escapes from time to time (Marcus Matthews, "Historical Mystery beasts of Great Britain", Talking Stick Magazine, London, Spring, 1995). In the 1100s and 1200s the Royal Menagerie in the Tower of London and the Royal Manor of Woodstock, now in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, the home of the Marlborough family had lions, tigers, leopards and wolves. In the 1800s, entrepreneurs like the Fossetts, Chipperfields, Barnum, Bailey and the Ringley brothers formed circuses as entertainment, but there were many less well known and less well run circuses from which escapes must have been common and unreported.
There have been many scares and reports since about 1960. These animals may have escaped due to the 1976 Dangerous Animals Act which banned people from keeping exotic pets without a license. People may have released young animals into the wild as breeding pairs in some cases.
Although these cats are nocturnal and move fast, preferring dense cover, and therefore notoriously difficult to film, there have been several videos and photographs of them.
- In the summer of 1986, a lynx or bob-cat on the Mendip Hills arched its back and hissed then jumped from a wall and under a five-barred gate into and old cattle shed. A month later several half eaten pigeons and a large paw print were seen. There was a badger sett under the shed and it seems that the cats might have been sharing the hole with badgers or foxes. At the side of the road was a dead badger.
- In May 1987, a puma-like cat was sighted from about a quarter of a mile through binoculars at Timberscombe in the Barle’s Valley on Exmoor. The cat was sunning itself on a hillside and was about the size of a labrador with a long tail and a small round head. The cat was beige in colour with a white front and its head lolled from side to side.
- In September of 1987, a large black panther or puma crossed a forestry track near Luxborough on the Brendon Hills near Exmoor. Up the hill minutes later, a heavily scratched log was found.
Sexton Ray Loxton of Pilton keeps a lookout for a big cat reported there earlier this year
In May 1994 a large tawny cat similar to a jungle cat was sighted at Motcombe Hill, near Shaftesbury. It crossed the road quickly. About ten other sightings were reported about that time from East Stour and Motcombe, several by lifelong country folk familiar with wildlife. One farmer saw the cat twice on Motcombe Hill and thought it was like a puma. Another farmer, finding a Roe deer in the woods dying from bites to its throat, went to his Land Rover for a shotgun to put it out of its misery. When he returned the deer had gone and he glimpsed an animal through the undergrowth. He believed it to have been a large cat. He heard a high pitched cat-like scream and his dog shook with fear. Another man saw a large black cat in daylight in the churchyard at East Stour. It was also seen crossing a field by two men who were interviewed in Motcombe village by Meridien News. A couple who owned a cattery saw a lynx-like cat several times and photographed a paw print over a muddy drain which was published in the Blackmoor Vale Magazine and the Western Daily Press.
Several big cats have been killed in recent years.
- A leopard cat was killed at Widecombe-on-the-Moor on Dartmoor, South Devon, in 1988. It was thought to have escaped from a travellers’ camp on the moor. It was shot by a farmer as it attacked his poultry. The cat was taken away by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) for rabies tests and was presumably destroyed later.
- A woman who ran it over in her car killed a jungle cat on Hayling Island, Portsmouth in the summer of 1988. The Portsmouth Evening News had a photograph of the woman holding the animal. It seemed to be part of a colony because, despite its demise, sightings continued.
- Two teenage boys at Rookley on the Isle of Wight killed a leopard cat in 1990. The boys buried the cat worried that it might have been protected but first photographed it. The well-known cryptozoologist, Dr Karl Shuker, showed it to be a leopard cat and not an ocelot as was first thought.
- In the summer of 1996, a jungle cat was killed at Black Dog Crossroads, near Warminster. The zoo at Paignton identified it as a jungle cat. Two jungle cats had escaped twenty years before in the area. Sightings of large cats are remarkably commonplace in and around Salisbury plain, Cranbourne Chase, Longleat Woods and the Wiltshire Downs, and the New Forest. There were several big cat scares and hunts around Warminster in the 1960s and 1970s. Marcus Matthews wrote an article in the magazine of the Society for Independent Research into the Unexplained in Science (SIRUIS) in September 1989 about the possible hybridisation of a jungle cat and a domestic cat on a farm at Lenkwardine over the Welsh border. The jungle cat had several descendants including a large tame smoky-grey neutered male cat called Jasper. Jasper had the characteristic markings of a jungle cat, a black stripe down the ridge of his back and under each shoulder. His ears were also characteristically pointed.
- Puma-like or lynx-like cats have been reported around Chantry, Nunney, Mells and Cranmore Woods. Former quarries and deep wooded valleys offer them ideal cover and they will feed off the rabbits and Roe deer in the area.
- Incidentally, Black Dog Crossroads was also the scene of the death of a Rhesus monkey, again run over. From 1979 to 1983 a monkey or ape was reported several times near Brassknocker Hill, near Bath. It could have been a chimpanzee, a spider monkey, a baboon or even an Aye-Aye lemur.
- A large black, panther-like cat was sighted several times around the Combe Grove Hotel, Monkton Combe, near Bath. Dubbed the "Beasts of Brassknocker Hill", they were reported in the 1980s.
The number of cats loose seems to be about 400, estimates varying from 200 to 800. Many reports stem from Scotland where the human population is lower and there are vast areas of wild country by British standards.
A dozen cats have been killed in the Grampian and Morayshire area of Scotland. They have been called the Kellas Cats from the village near Forres. They are like a backcross strain between Scottish Wild Cats and domestic cats. About the size of a fox they have developed a black coat with white guard hairs. Di Francis has kept several Kellas Cats on her farm in Banffshire and she has written about them extensively. There are several stuffed Kellas Cats alongside Wild Cats in the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Theories about them have stretched from spirits and ghosts like those of the black dog of death, Black Shuck, to creatures dropped off the interstellar menagerie from UFOs. There is a more realistic theory that Britain has its own big cat but it is unpopular with zoologists who find it hard to accept to an elusive creature. Di Francis sticks by this but it is unproven and plainly the animal must be incredibly shy and furtive to have escaped attention for so long. Nevertheless Di Francis has collected many reports and has done a lot of work on the Kellas Cat.
Mostly though they are a recent phenomenon, resulting from the aforementioned dangerous Animals Act. It is a moot point whether the native species is really some hybrid that has constantly been renewed by fresh escapes. A Leopard Cat, originally from Edinburgh zoo, escaped and was loose on the Minto estate in the Border Country, near Jedburgh, for eight months before a gamekeeper killed it attacking pheasant in February 1988. Earlier, a puma was captured at Cannich, near Loch Ness. Since then there have been reports of similar beasts in the locality. This puma was about fifteen years old when she died in 1985 in a wildlife park. She was obviously a tame animal and had not spent enough time in the wild to recapture her wild habits.
So, the big cats might eventually die in the cold and damp of Great Britain but their genes will have already entered the pool of the feral domestic moggy. It is hardly surprising these hybrids are breeding in remote parts.
