I was camping and hitchhiking in the Lakes with a friend about 12 years ago. We aimed to get over High Street (a large hill) and to the next bothy within a day but it was harder than we expected, so we ended up setting off down the other side well after nightfall. The moon was out so light wasn't really a problem, but we were both a bit freaked out by not really knowing exactly where we were or what the weather might do (this was in January, and a blizzard did come through the next day - but even in summer you have to be careful there). There was about 6 inches of snow over everything and it was hard going on the way down - with lots of tripping over hidden rocks and worrying about slipping into cracks or over the edges of waterfalls etc - so we were both getting increasingly agitated.
Anyway, about half way down we came upon some large animal footprints and stopped to look at them. They were very clear and we both thought they could have been big cat prints. They looked too big for a dog, and the location and time of year didn't make that much sense for casual dog walking and there were no other human prints around. We still had a few miles to go and camping out in tents or in a sheep shelter for the night was very much on the table, so I think we both decided to just put the idea of a big cat out of our minds, to the extent we took it seriously to begin with. Makes me wonder!
Yeah, could have been a dog. I would say a dog with a human and we just didn't see the person's tracks is more likely than escaped though as we were miles from the nearest house and I think an escaped dog would have had the sense not to walk half way up High Street by itself in that weather. One thing about these prints is they were very clean though. This looked like something that was walking, as opposed to bounding this way and that like a dog sometimes does. All pure speculation of course, but with a dog + human I would expect them to be either walking together, or for the dog to be running around chaotically, still fairly close to the person.
"Speaker to Animals" was a Kzinti name, popular enough among fen of the era that I've even seen it on a business card as a job title. (IIRC, for a sales engineer?)
I can imagine them climbing on top of cathedrals or tower apartment blocks and curling up on the roofs to soak in the sunlight while the buildings precariously creak under the cats' weight and eventually collapse. The giant cats unfazed move to the next cathedral ... that would be a very British giant cat apocalypse.
Why not both? I mean, the standard Skynet murder robots/nuclear apocalypse scenario is indeed boring. Skynet x AlphaFold solving protein folding and hitting us with molecular nanotech? Swarms of giant murder cats would be on the table.
I confess to some scepticism. The lady concerned seems to be a dedicated big cat believer, with seven sightings already[0]. If other witnesses had been present, I would be more accepting of the claim.
Isn't that a little like saying archaeologists seem to find a suspiciously large number of historical objects, or tornado hunters seem to have a suspiciously large number of tornado sightings?
Non-archaeologists find historical objects, and as a former midwesterner, I can assure you that you need no particular background to be able to see tornadoes. It would, indeed, be very suspicious if _only_ those interested in archaeology or tornadoes claimed to observe these.
I think the problem os being only a single witness claiming to have sighted them? The Loch Ness monster has more reported sightings, so a single witness, imo, is not enough to say with a large degree of certainty that there is a big cat roaming around.
Indeed — but with the caveat of assuming accurate journalism and that this really is a good DNA test and result and no caveats were removed in the reporting.
Newspapers are like LLMs: when I'm not already a domain expert I have no way to determine their accuracy, but when I am they're often at least a bit wrong in some important way. This is also known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Agree, it reminds me a bit of the guy who was really obsessed by the mh370 mystery and happens to have found more pieces of the plane than anyone else. It’s certainly possible, but I remain skeptical
I mean, several of those parts has matching serial numbers with the corresponding parts installed on MH-370. I'm not sure how one could fake that without a lot of nonpublic information.
And didn't the dude in question walk along the entire coastline of Madagascar looking for washed up debris? That's certainly a plausible reason to find them.
Very skeptical. I would also like more detail in the article, what was the DNA collected from? Hair? Saliva? How was it stored, collected and tested? Who sent it in? This website has a bit of detail around what can be tested: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/archaeobotany...
Sheffield, a city with a lot of terraced housing, is particularly prone to "big cat scares", the usual story being that it moves around in the roof-spaces of the adjoined terraces. I lived next door to a lovely little old lady who was convinced that the noises in her attic were from an errant leopard rather than a pigeon.
That's hilarious. Have they checked there's not something in the environment turning people mad? Is it even common for terraced houses to share roof space without a dividing wall??
They tend to be built in 4s, with a covered alleyway between the two middle ones (a "gennel" in local parlance), the roof ends have supporting walls of course, the middle ones sometimes have brick, sometimes just wood and a panel-wall to support the (always slate) roof proper.
As to madness, almost certainly, they're all barking (in an agreeable way).
It's very unlikely any unreported big cats have escaped into the UK countryside since the late 1970s (when the Dangerous Wild Animals act basically outlawed them as pets and some owners let them loose in the wild).
It would be quite amazing for there to be enough animals to maintain a mating population of atleast 3 or 4 generations since then without them being seen much more frequently.
That is to assume that people are not illegally breeding, selling and keeping big cats today in Britain - people who keep one of these cats and lose it (or set it 'free' when it becomes to problematic to look after), would not be approaching the authorities.
There a surprisingly large trade in illegal animals in the UK - most people will know nothing about it. But check out recent new articles about dumped snakes and giant tortoises https://eastdevonnews.co.uk/2024/02/13/east-devon-police-inv.... Local to me a man was arrested for breeding Savannah cats.
I live in East Anglia and there is at least one sighting every couple of years, often with significantly blurry photo evidence of a dark, pantherine animal, 100m+ away. It's relegated to the "and finally" segment of local news.
I don't think I believe it either but the British countryside is vast, well stocked. An animal like this could evade human contact if it wanted.
While there are definately parallels with bigfoot sightings here, I can personally vouch for how rare cat sightings are.
I have spent a lot of my life in deep wildernes, and the only time I saw a big cat in the wild was when I was a kid (aprox 14yo), up in mid- British Columbia (Canada), literally a hundred miles from any town.
I was alone, waiting at our truck while the family was checking if a side-road was traversable. (My dad was a big wilderness fisher). maybe half a kilometer down the "main" (dirt) road, I saw a huge cat casually walk across the road, into the forest on the other side.
It looked completely black, but likely because the side facing me was in shade. Cougars are the only big cat native to the area.
Of course my dad dismissed my account as daydreaming.
I have seen bear, bobcat, and even Coyotee in the wild. Not wolf though.
No idea about the UK, but in Brazil, in a highly populated area between Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Santa Catarina, in the mountains where rainforest is still preserved (Serra do Mar and Serra da Mantiqueira), it's know that there are big cats (locally called onça). This video shows some great footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeDfeGR_kxI
I lived in that area most of my youth (but not in the last 20 years) and was outdoors a lot. I've never seen one of these animals, and didn't know anyone that had seen one (except for the rare dead animal found in the woods, or live animal that got trapped somewhere like a farm shed in some faraway farm). They're absolutely masters in not being seen... so I don't doubt there could be a few in the UK and nobody manages to get a good look at them.
EDIT : for those saying the big cats are dangerous, to my knowledge they're extremely shy and stay the hell away from people. I would be surprised if they've been known to attack, let alone kill someone in the last several decades (they talk about that in the video, but it's in portuguese).
My partner has had two (very) close up sightings and she said sightings among her peer group were common enough that no one thought it was that big a deal.
This was in the late 90’s though. There are certainly enough sheep and rabbits in the English countryside to support a small population of big cats.
Unless those big cats were dispersed in >5 numbers in the same area how are they supposed to reproduce? This problem will just solve itself in a couple of (cat) years
I think we are long past the era when kids would run off for miles into the countryside, unaccompanied by an adult.
Plus if it did have a taste for humans, we’d already have reports of people being attacked by now. So if there is a big cat, and that’s a big “if”, then it’s more likely the cat is at risk from farmers shooting a predictor to the farm’s livestock, than kids are at risk from the cat
> Rick Minter, who has received more than 1,000 reports of people’s encounters with big cats, said the animal was most likely to have been a leopard.
> Of the five species in the Panthera genus – lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar and snow leopard – the only other cat that has a similar melanistic form is the jaguar, and they don’t appear to be in the British countryside, he added.
I'm failing to see why that's an argument that favors leopards over jaguars.
Readit News
Anyway, about half way down we came upon some large animal footprints and stopped to look at them. They were very clear and we both thought they could have been big cat prints. They looked too big for a dog, and the location and time of year didn't make that much sense for casual dog walking and there were no other human prints around. We still had a few miles to go and camping out in tents or in a sheep shelter for the night was very much on the table, so I think we both decided to just put the idea of a big cat out of our minds, to the extent we took it seriously to begin with. Makes me wonder!
Aren't larger dog breeds about the same size as big cats? Looking it up, a small English mastiff is larger than a big leopard for example.
An escaped dog seems far more likely than an escaped big cat.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_big_cats#Proven_captur...
I should add, the "Alien" in ABC denotes alien to the country they were found in. Not alien to planet Earth! :)
"Speaker to Animals" was a Kzinti name, popular enough among fen of the era that I've even seen it on a business card as a job title. (IIRC, for a sales engineer?)
If you're reading this, you are the resistance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr6CyU-Ev_M
Their one Achilles Heel.
While we let AI take over, we will rest easy it won’t be as bad as skynet.
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[0] https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/19808796.cumbrias-sharon-...
Newspapers are like LLMs: when I'm not already a domain expert I have no way to determine their accuracy, but when I am they're often at least a bit wrong in some important way. This is also known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
And didn't the dude in question walk along the entire coastline of Madagascar looking for washed up debris? That's certainly a plausible reason to find them.
As to madness, almost certainly, they're all barking (in an agreeable way).
It would be quite amazing for there to be enough animals to maintain a mating population of atleast 3 or 4 generations since then without them being seen much more frequently.
There a surprisingly large trade in illegal animals in the UK - most people will know nothing about it. But check out recent new articles about dumped snakes and giant tortoises https://eastdevonnews.co.uk/2024/02/13/east-devon-police-inv.... Local to me a man was arrested for breeding Savannah cats.
I live in East Anglia and there is at least one sighting every couple of years, often with significantly blurry photo evidence of a dark, pantherine animal, 100m+ away. It's relegated to the "and finally" segment of local news.
I don't think I believe it either but the British countryside is vast, well stocked. An animal like this could evade human contact if it wanted.
I have spent a lot of my life in deep wildernes, and the only time I saw a big cat in the wild was when I was a kid (aprox 14yo), up in mid- British Columbia (Canada), literally a hundred miles from any town.
I was alone, waiting at our truck while the family was checking if a side-road was traversable. (My dad was a big wilderness fisher). maybe half a kilometer down the "main" (dirt) road, I saw a huge cat casually walk across the road, into the forest on the other side.
It looked completely black, but likely because the side facing me was in shade. Cougars are the only big cat native to the area.
Of course my dad dismissed my account as daydreaming.
I have seen bear, bobcat, and even Coyotee in the wild. Not wolf though.
I lived in that area most of my youth (but not in the last 20 years) and was outdoors a lot. I've never seen one of these animals, and didn't know anyone that had seen one (except for the rare dead animal found in the woods, or live animal that got trapped somewhere like a farm shed in some faraway farm). They're absolutely masters in not being seen... so I don't doubt there could be a few in the UK and nobody manages to get a good look at them.
EDIT : for those saying the big cats are dangerous, to my knowledge they're extremely shy and stay the hell away from people. I would be surprised if they've been known to attack, let alone kill someone in the last several decades (they talk about that in the video, but it's in portuguese).
This was in the late 90’s though. There are certainly enough sheep and rabbits in the English countryside to support a small population of big cats.
Plus if it did have a taste for humans, we’d already have reports of people being attacked by now. So if there is a big cat, and that’s a big “if”, then it’s more likely the cat is at risk from farmers shooting a predictor to the farm’s livestock, than kids are at risk from the cat
I can't understand why this documentary hasn't been made yet.
However, if they're out there, I'd like to know why we don't get reports of treed carcasses. You'd think a dead sheep in a tree would attract comment.
> Of the five species in the Panthera genus – lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar and snow leopard – the only other cat that has a similar melanistic form is the jaguar, and they don’t appear to be in the British countryside, he added.
I'm failing to see why that's an argument that favors leopards over jaguars.