The Beast of Bodmin and Britain's Big Cats: Escapes, Sightings and a Leopard Rug

Britain has no native big cats. Its only wild cat is the Scottish wildcat, a rare animal not much bigger than a large house cat, found only in Scotland. Yet for decades people across Britain have reported large black cats, usually called panthers, and tawny ones that look like pumas, padding across fields or crossing country roads in the headlights. The sightings have names in every region, and the best known are the Beast of Exmoor and the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

Unlike a lake monster, a big cat is not an impossible animal. Leopards, pumas and lynx exist, people have kept them as pets and in private collections, and a few have certainly escaped. The question is not whether a big cat has ever been loose in Britain, but whether enough of them ever lived wild to breed, and behind most of the sightings the evidence points elsewhere.

Reports of a large cat on Exmoor, the moorland of Somerset and Devon, go back to the 1970s. The story became national news in 1983, when a farmer near South Molton said he had lost more than a hundred sheep, killed, he believed, by a big cat. The government sent Royal Marine snipers to watch the moor. No cat was shot, caught or positively identified.

Livestock losses on that scale have ordinary explanations that are hard to tell apart in the field: large dogs, which kill sheep far more often than people expect, foxes, and the natural deaths and scavenging that follow. The Beast of Exmoor became a fixture of local lore, but the hunt left nothing behind but the story.

By the 1990s the focus had moved to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, where farmers blamed a big cat for dead livestock. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food investigated and, in July 1995, reported that it had found no verifiable evidence of a big cat on the moor, while acknowledging that it could not prove one was not there.

Days later, a teenager walking by the River Fowey on the edge of the moor found a large cat skull with long fangs, and for a moment it looked like the proof. The Natural History Museum in London examined it. It was a genuine leopard skull, from a young male, but the leopard had not died on Bodmin Moor. The museum found that the skull had been cut from a leopard-skin rug and had come to Britain as an import. The skull came to Cornwall the way most big-cat evidence does: through people.

Some big cats in Britain have been entirely real. On October 29, 1980, a farmer near Cannich, in the Scottish Highlands, caught a female puma in a cage trap after a long run of sightings and livestock losses. The director of the Highland Wildlife Park, where she was taken, judged that she was far too tame and well fed to have been living wild, and she was most likely an abandoned pet. Named Felicity, she lived at the park until 1985, and her preserved body is on display at Inverness Museum. A caracal was shot in Northern Ireland in 1996, and a lynx was captured in Cricklewood, in north London, in 2001.

One popular theory is that owners turned their animals loose when the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 made keeping them require a licence. It is plausible for a few animals, but there is no record of a wave of releases, and a handful of escaped cats, without mates, would not found a population. The government's environment department has said there are no credible reports of wild-living or breeding big cats in Britain.

Most big-cat sightings are brief, distant and without anything to judge size by. A large black domestic cat seen across a field, or a black dog at the edge of a wood, is easy to scale up, especially by someone who already knows the local stories. Photographs and videos rarely include a fence post or a gate to measure against, and many that do turn out to show house cats.

A breeding population of leopards or pumas would leave a great deal behind: road casualties, carcasses, clear tracks, droppings with DNA, and unmistakable trail-camera footage in a country thick with cameras. Despite decades of searching, that body of evidence has not appeared. The British big cat endures as a mystery of perception and storytelling, with a few real escapees in its history.