Feral

by George Monbiot

  Michael had been driving down the lane towards the A40, returning from an inspection visit. He had heard the stories, seen pictures in the local paper of the prints found at Princes Gate, a few miles to the other side of Haverfordwest, and had not believed a word of it.

  ‘If I’d been dreaming or thinking about them at the time, it might have been another matter. But it was the last thing on my mind. I was just driving along–and one crosses the road. He was probably about three feet high and six feet long. I would say bigger than a medium-sized dog, but definitely not a dog. He was powerful-looking, with a black, glossy, shiny coat, incredibly muscular, like a horse’s shoulders. But it was the head that was really strange-looking. I’ve never seen a head like that, not even in a zoo.’

  Michael Disney, former policeman, county council officer, had, to his own astonishment, become one of roughly 2,000 people who see a big cat in the wild in Britain every year.

  By the time Michael saw the beast now known as the Pembrokeshire Panther, there had, according to Wales on Sunday, been ten ‘confirmed sightings’.1 Some of those who claimed to have seen it were farmers or farmworkers, familiar with the county’s less exotic wildlife. Among them were the farmer and–independently–his wife, whose land bordered the lane in which we stood. All described it, as Michael had done, as huge, jet-black, glossy, with a long tail, definitely a cat. One person claimed to have seen it with a lamb in its mouth. Another described how it ‘cleared a hedge like a racehorse’.2 It was blamed for the grisly carcasses of sheep and calves found in remote corners of the farms.

  But it was only when the former policeman reported it to both his current and former colleagues that the beast began to be taken seriously. The County Times described his sighting as ‘100% authentic’.3 Three weeks later, when five people saw it at Rudbaxton, the police sent out an armed response unit. A spokesman for Dyfed-Powys police told me that they were advising people to keep their distance if they saw the Pembrokeshire Panther, and to report it to the council. ‘We have to take it seriously, even though strictly speaking it’s not a police matter, unless people are in imminent danger.’ He added that, in response to reports like Michael’s, the Welsh Assembly Government had set up a Big Cat Sightings Unit. I checked: the unit, improbable creature though it is, exists.

  I became certain that Michael is an honest, reliable, unexcitable man who has no interest in publicity–in fact he seemed embarrassed by it. I am certain that, in common with other people who claim to have spotted the Beast, he faithfully described what he saw. I am equally certain that the Pembrokeshire Panther does not exist.

  There is scarcely a self-respecting borough in Britain which does not now possess–or is not now possessed by–a Beast. Even the London suburbs claim to be infested with big cats: there is a Beast of Barnet, a Beast of Cricklewood, a Crystal Palace Puma and a Sydenham Panther. There have been occasional reports of mysterious British cats throughout history. The earliest written record–Cath Palug (Palug’s Cat or the Clawing Cat)–is found in the Black Book of Carmarthen, written, as the panther runs, thirty miles from where Michael Disney saw his creature. The fragment at the top of this chapter is all that remains of this account: ‘His shield was ready/Against Cath Palug/When the people welcomed him./Who pierced the Cath Palug?/Nine score before dawn/Would fall for its food./Nine score chieftains.’4 But the same animal also appears in the Welsh Triads, where its reported attributes present an even stiffer challenge to biology: it was born, alongside a wolf and an eagle, to a giant sow.

  Over the past few years the sightings have boomed. In her wonderful book Mystery Big Cats, Merrily Harpur finds that ‘cat-flaps’, as she calls them, are occurring at the rate of 2,000–4,000 a year.5 As I have discovered while travelling around the country, many others who have not seen these cats ardently believe that they exist.

  Among the Beast-spotters are people even better placed to know what they are seeing than Michael and the Pembrokeshire farmers: gamekeepers, park rangers, wildlife experts, a retired zookeeper. As Merrily Harpur notes, 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.

  Though the sightings are consistent and the witnesses reliable, the hard evidence for an extant population of big cats in the UK is no stronger than the evidence for the Loch Ness monster. In other words, despite the thousands of days cryptozoologists have spent hunting the Beast, despite the concentrated efforts of the police, the Royal Marines and government scientists, there is none.

  Though some species of large cat are among the shyest and most cunning of all wild animals, finding evidence that they exist is not difficult, for those who know what they are doing. They are creatures of regular habits. They have territories, dens in which cubs are raised, spraying points and scratching posts. They scatter prints, spraints and hairs wherever they go: the first are immediately recognizable, the provenance of the second and third can be confirmed by DNA testing.

  Even those which are seldom seen leave so much evidence that they can be closely studied. I once spent a few days with some biologists in a forest reserve in the Amazon. At night we would hear the jaguars mewing; but I was told by the team leader that, though they might be watching us, we would never see them. One day I wandered down to the stream a few yards from the camp to swim. I spent twenty minutes in the water, then walked back along the sandy path. In my footprints were the pugmarks of a jaguar.

  The 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition was won by a photograph of one of the world’s most elusive animals–the snow leopard–taken in one of the world’s least accessible places: the Ladakhi Himalayas, 13,000 feet above sea level. The photograph did not just document the existence of the leopard: after thirteen months of experiments, and hundreds of less satisfactory pictures of his quarry, Steve Winter, through a cunning arrangement of camera traps and lights, eventually produced a perfectly composed portrait. ‘I knew the animal would come;’ he reported. His equipment ‘was just waiting for the actor to walk on stage and break the beam’.6

  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–the best the champions of these mysterious felines can produce–around half are evidently domestic cats. Roughly a quarter are cardboard cut-outs, cuddly toys, crude photoshopping or–as the surrounding vegetation reveals–pictures taken in the tropics. The remainder are so distant and indistinct that they could be almost anything: dogs, deer, foxes, bin liners, yetis on all fours. One of the most intriguing features of this story is that hardly anyone who has set out to find a big cat in Britain has ever seen one. Almost without exception, the sightings have been unexpected; in most cases the cats appear to people who had never thought about them or did not believe in them. Pasteur’s maxim–that chance favours the prepared mind–seems in this case not to apply.

  Nor have the tireless efforts to catch or kill these animals yielded anything more convincing. As Harpur notes, ‘more effort and expense than ever went into Imperial tiger hunts has been expended in the hunt for anomalous big cats’, and it has produced nothing except a few hapless creatures which have escaped from zoos or circuses or private collections, and are in almost all cases caught within a few hours of their flight. There is a marvellous account in Harpur’s book of a policeman sent out at night to investigate the sighting of a lion in Leamington Spa. He stopped to ask a milkman if he had seen the animal. As he did so, he recorded, ‘the next thing I was aware of was a passing blur and a sudden weight’ in the back of the car. ‘In one fluid movem
ent the lion had jumped through the back window on to the passenger seat.’ It settled down immediately and the officer, not unconscious of its breath on the back of his neck, drove it to the station.

  In 1980, following a series of livestock killings, a female puma was caught in a baited cage trap by a farmer in Easter Ross, in Scotland. At first it appeared to be a wild and ferocious beast, snarling and spitting at its captors. But the effect was spoilt once the puma had settled into Kincraig Wildlife Park: Harpur reports that whenever anyone approached her cage, she would start purring and rubbing against the bars. It seems that she was one of a pair released in the Highlands in 1979 by a man about to be sent to prison. The other was later found dead near Inverness.

  Since then, though hundreds of such traps have been set, only one large predator has been caught. A cryptozoologist called Pete Bailey, who had spent fifteen 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.7 We hunt the Beast, but the Beast is us.

  That is about the extent of it: no photos, no captures, no dung, no corpses (except a couple of skulls, which later turned out to have gone feral after they had escaped from a leopardskin rug and a wall trophy), not even a certain footprint. The Beasts of Britain have evaded a five-week hunt by the Royal Marines, police helicopters and armed response teams (it beats logging car crime), a succession of big cat experts and bounty hunters and the mass deployment of the best tracking, attracting and sensing technologies known to humankind. These techniques have worked elsewhere; not here.

  In 1995 the government sent two investigators to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, where the evidence for big cats was said to be strongest. They spent six months in the field, examining carcasses and footprints, exploring the places where the Beast of Bodmin was spotted and photographed. There is something of the nineteenth-century royal commission about this investigation. The report contains photographs 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.8 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 realize 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, and there were no useful landmarks against which to compare it, 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. (Undeterred, the supporters of the Beast of Bodmin now insist that the original pictures show baby big cats, whose parents are mysteriously absent from the scene. Stills from these videos continue to be used as evidence that big cats roam Britain.)

  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.

  They examined the three plaster casts of footprints taken from the moor. Two were made by a domestic cat, one by a dog. They attended the gruesome corpses of sheep that local people insisted had been ripped apart by the Beast. That they had been ripped apart was indisputable, but the villains were crows, badgers, foxes or dogs (whose footprints were distributed liberally around some carcasses), and in most cases they had struck after the sheep had died of other causes. While the scientists conceded that it was impossible to prove that a big cat did not exist, they found that there was no hard evidence to support the story. Both the official body Natural England and the Welsh government’s Big Cat Sighting Unit, investigating sightings across Britain, confirmed to me that they have come to the same conclusion.

  I would go a step further: if a breeding population of these animals existed, hard evidence would be abundant and commonplace. Its absence shows that there is no such population. With the possible exception of the very occasional fugitive (almost all of which have been quickly caught or killed and none of which is black), the beasts reported by so many sober, upright, reputable people are imaginary.

  None of this has made the slightest difference, either to the number of sightings or to the breathless credulity with which they are reported in the papers. A story in the Daily Mail claimed that ‘huge paw prints’ in the snow ‘could finally be proof’ that the Beast of Stroud exists.9 The woman who found them told the paper ‘it looks like someone’s just dropped a dart at the end of each toe where its claw has made an indentation in the snow’. This confirms what the photos suggest: the prints were made by a dog. Cats retract their claws when they walk.

  A long report in the Scotsman titled ‘Do giant paw prints mean big cat is on the prowl in Capital?’ claimed that marks found by a pensioner in the snow suggest that Edinburgh, like London, is now haunted by a monstrous feline.10 An ‘expert’ it consulted decided that ‘it’s unlikely but not impossible’ that the prints were made by a Beast. If so, it must have been a scary creature: a one-legged ghoul hopping up the pavement on tiptoes. Or it might have been someone sticking his fingers in the snow.

  There was an equally plausible story in the Guardian. It reports the claims of a man who says he was attacked by the Sydenham Panther.11 The Beast ‘jumped on my chest, knocking me to the ground’, he said. ‘I could see these huge teeth and the whites of its eyes just inches from my face. It was snarling and growling and I really believed it was trying to do some serious damage. I tried to get it off but I couldn’t move it, it was heavier than me.’ A further report by the BBC alleged that the Panther had him ‘in its claws for about 30 seconds’, with the result that ‘he was scratched all over his body’.12 Had he really been attacked by a leopard in this fashion, his throat would have been ripped out before he could blink.

  My favourite story, from the Daily Mail, was headlined ‘Is this the Beast of Exmoor? Body of mystery animal washes up on beach’.13 Beside a photograph of a decomposed head (and another of a snarling black panther), it reported that ‘great fangs jutted from its huge jaw, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Then there was the carcass. Up to 5ft long, powerful chest, and what could be the remains of a tail.’ The paper interviewed a local police sergeant, who made the cryptic observation that ‘it almost definitely looks like it could be a Beast of Exmoor’. Only at the bottom of the page did the report reveal that it was a putrefying seal.

  Beast fever has doubtless been heightened by these engaging stories, but many of those who claim to have seen big cats in Britain also maintain that they had never heard of them before their own encounter. There is little question that, while a few are hoaxers, most report their sightings in good faith. In many cases an animal has been seen by a group of people, all of whom give similar accounts. So what is going on? Why, over the past three decades, have reports of big cats in Britain risen from a few dozen a year to thousands?

  There is no discussion of this phenomenon in the scientific literature: I cannot find a single journal article on big cat sightings. None of the psychologists I have contacted has been able to direct me to anyone studying it.

  The fact that most of the reported cats are black perhaps gives us a clue about what might be happening. Black is the only colour that big cats of any species commonly share with domestic cats. If you glimpse what you take to be a ginger leopard or a tortoiseshell lion, you are likely severely to question your perceptions before allowing yourself to accept what
you think you saw. You are likely to be even more reticent when telling other people about your experience. The mismatch between colour and size interrupts the process of affirmation, in which your memory reinforces and perhaps exaggerates what you saw. The interruption is less likely to occur if the cat is black, which permits at least the possibility that it could be a panther. The moggie hypothesis might also explain why no one appears to have seen a leopard in a leopardskin coat.

  Judging the size of an animal is difficult. As David Hambling points out in the magazine The Skeptic, people often imagine that the creatures they see are very much bigger than they are.14 For example, when police marksmen cornered an escaped caracal in County Tyrone, they shot it dead in the belief that it was a lion. Lions are twenty times the weight of caracals. The Kellas Cat of Scotland is a black beast which really does exist: it is a hybrid of the Scottish wildcat and the feral domestic cat. It has often been reported as approximating the size of a leopard. In fact the biggest specimen ever killed or captured was forty-three inches from nose to tail, which is smaller than the largest wildcats. It may be particularly hard to judge the size of a black animal.

  In his book Paranormality, the psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman tells us:

  Many people think that human observation and memory work like a video recorder or film camera. Nothing could be further from the truth . . . At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings . . . to help ensure that precious time and energy aren’t wasted on trivial details, your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of its attention on these elements.15

  The brain, he says, scans the scene like a torch searching a darkened room. It fills in the gaps, to construct what appears to be a complete image from partial information.