To wonder if big cats really can be roaming the countryside?

[Qantaqa]

Local news this morning reports "scratch marks" in trees in area where big cat sightings taken place over last decade.

I totally get that back in the 70s various big cats were released rather than people comply with the new laws coming in, but 50 years later can they really still be there?

Enough might have adapted to live wildly themselves (I assume many didn't, or died from cars etc), but they don't live 50 years so we must be on a 2nd / 3rd generation - surely mating with cross species? Aren't they quite territorial and solitary? Where do the next gen go when they mature? It's not like there is loads and loads of places they can hang out? Even if we didn't see the cats wouldn't there be more signs of them?

Basil and Leroy have a lot to answer for...

😂😂😂
Are you familiar with the phrase "tongue in cheek"? 😉

My father claimed he saw a large black cat on our farm in the early noughties, near to a neighbouring farmer's field of sheep. I've no reason not to believe him- he's a no nonsense, doesn't suffer fools lightly, serious type of man and he was adamant in what he saw.

Big black cat sightings are just large domestic cats. It is difficult to judge size when it is all black. The main thing to notice is the length of the tail comparative to the body. A ‘big’ cat would have a much longer tail.

I think that there is enough evidence that over the years there have been a few big cats around living in woods/moors etc. There was quite probably one on Exmoor for a few years.
The most likely explanation is released privately owned cats, owners who were holding them illegally and when they got too big and scratchy let them go. Or they escaped.

The more interesting question is whether there were ever enough or the same breed for them to establish breeding pairs anywhere.
There is a huge difference between an escaped cat living on a moor for a few years and that same cat breeding and them becoming a resident species.

It is extrememly unlikely that they have ever moved from escaped animals to breeding populations.

The other thing is that most people do get perspective and size wrong.
For example, my bedroom window looks out over a big field with a row of bushes and trees down one side of it. One morning when I looked out there was a huge cat sitting on the other side of the field. About the width of a football pitch away. I stood and watched it for a while, it walked up and down and it honestly looked bigger than an alsation. I have dogs and cats and know the space well, so I though I was reasonably good at estimating. It was the colour of a domestic cat though. As I stood and watched it (and it never occurred to me to try and get a photo by the way) it walked down the field towards me, still looking huge, then it walked in front of one of the bushes and suddenly it looked the size of a domestic cat. It was a trick of angles and perspective. It made me realise how often we can get that wrong, and that many sighting are probably large domestic cats.

I am not sure to be honest but google, Hampstead big cat or North London big cat, not going to link as it's all Daily Mail etc. But that was a big thing maybe a year or two ago, apparently escaped from a very very wealthy house on a road that is locally called Billionaires Row.

I agree if there were lots of Pumas around, surely they are dead by now and remains would have been found

I dunno but I did see a couple of years ago, a very large black cat shaped cat across the field from me. Too big to be a domestic cat

Yes I believe there are having seen one myself.

A large black cat, the size of an Alsatian dog walking down the centre of a lane towards me before it turned and slinked into the woodland at the side of the road in that way cats do.

No picture as I was driving at the time and although I had slowed to a stop to watch it coming towards me, it was gone before I thought to grab my phone from my bag.

Well Im not an outdoorsy type but I can never get my phone out my handbag quick enough to answer the phone let alone get into the camera section and take a pic of anything quickly

Whilst I agree that perspective of size, in a wide expanse, such as a field, can be ‘off’, the cat I saw was around 40 feet ahead of me - e.g cloae enough I could see facial features and he was exiting a field to my right and crossing a road in front of me.
This was a road that I was extremely familiar with and that I could use landmarks such as bushes, fences, kerbs and road markings to place his position and size.
I’m in no doubt it was a large black cat. Around 2 to 2.5 feet tall and 4 foot long with a really long tail. He slinked across the (car and other people) empty road like my cat moves when she is just moving about without any urgency.
He looked like a cat (ear size and shape etc) and he moved like a cat and his back legs in particular were cat like, the way they kind of rolled on the joint. I am as certain as this description to this day, as I am my own name.

I’ve attached the current map of the Tamworth road area, to show how cat attractive it is.. there used to be (doesn’t look like there is any more) a pond aswell in the fields it came out of, big enough to fish in. I’m not sure if the fields have been developed as they have street/track names now too. But it was absolutely not the case back in 1996. The cat could roam freely without bother.

For every hiker who can’t access their phone fast there’s another who is using it to take photos all the way up and another (Dh) who is using Back Country Navigator or similar (and while he also has a paper map we know from recent mountain rescue reports that many don’t).
The point is not that every single encounter will be photographed but that the odds are much higher now.
It’s also not just hikers off the beaten track that have reported sightings in the past but dog walkers, farmers etc.

Oh i.do hope so.I like the idea of a co!ony of bigcats roaming the countryside ,there were reports of a black panther type cat,roaming the streets of Breightmet,in Bolton in the 00,s which amused me if you know the area ,it's very built up area and just about as far from remote as you can get .

Naaah, theyd eat the sheep and lambs - you’d see the skins and bits lying about.

I like the idea too - I think its the thought that there are still things we don't know much about.

My cat could easily be taken for a panther from a distance. She's jet black, very large and very fit.

I live on the edge of a small town near open countryside.

My friend, a few streets away, is animal mad, dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens. Her back yard is well defended from the local foxes and she is used to seeing them, from her kitchen window, sunning themselves on the shed roof.

She looked out one day, about 15yrs ago, to see something the size of a large dog fox on the roof, but a cat, tabby markings. She watched it watching the chickens in their run. When she moved to get a camera it must have spotted her in the window and it went. Around the same time people were talking about seeing a very large tabby like cat from the train. Of course it was dismissed as "probably a massive Maine Coon" but my friend was insistent it was short haired and def not a MC 🤷‍♀️

I've lived in three countries where there are no native big cats and these stories were always around.

I think they were around, but I'm not so sure about nowadays. We used to live rurally and my mum saw something run across the track ahead of her when she was running, she was sure it wasn't a dog but it was the same size as a labrador, black and with a long tail. Our neighbour also found a couple of foot prints in a pile of sand he had in the garden, they were pretty big.

I really want to think these are around
but whenever anyone posts a pic, it turns out to be a domestic cat and I find myself looking at the pics and wondering how on earth they thought it was a panther or whatever.

it is not rutting season for deer that is in the autumn, you would expect deer to give birth to new fawns in the next month or so

Sleepeazie
I have no doubt, as I said in my post, that there are big cats around.
(and again, the interesting thing to me is not an escaped cat living wild, but if they have established breeding populations)
Plenty of perfectly sensible people have reported seeing them in contexts where the perspective was in no doubt.

I just think that a lot of sightings are domestic cats.
There are very large domestic cats out there.
There was a case recently there loads of people kept spotting the same 'big cat' only for the local newspaper to run a story on the oversized domestic cat that was the source of all the sightings.

About as likely as Nessie being real imo. Black panthers are very rare even in Africa/South America so its highly unlikely there is even one roaming free in the UK. Big cats would undoubtedly prey on sheep and yet there are never reports of big cat-like kills anywhere. There is never scat and never tracks.

Having said that I did see what could have been a puma crossing a back road in Roseland about 10 years ago.

I do hope so, but there is little reliable evidence for it.

I think there were in the past, probably not now. A relative, a farmer found a half eaten lamb up a tree. Whatever dragged it up there must have been pretty big and strong.