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DNA Confirms There IS A Big Cat Roaming The British Countryside

SimonBurchell said:
Just post your experience. In the end, does it matter if anyone believes you or not? I've posted various odd experiences on the board over the years, they've generally been well received but I think the most relevant one for this discussion was a recent weird stay at an inn in north Devon. Brief recap - jolted out of sleep by the noise of something dragging across the floor of my room, sounding very loud and very close - best guess, the shower door being slowly and deliberately slid closed. Later woken up by voices of people coming back from a night out and going in the adjoining room - but the room was unoccupied and undisturbed when I got up the next morning. Discussion following this arrived at the conclusion that it was probably staff getting up to hanky panky - I actually don't agree because it doesn't really fit in with what I heard. But in the end, what does it matter? Post your experience, at the very best there will be intelligent discussion, whether you agree with the general conclusion or not. It's also a decent way to log your anecdotes, so they don't just disappear into obscurity.
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Exactly this. The problem with Fortean type experiences is the lack of actual evidence. The only exception in my case is the written evidence I have of the experience I had about which I wrote in my first post on the forum. Without that I could prove nothing and I would still be ignorant myself. Indeed I think it would be sufficient to convince a court. None of my others have witnesses photos recordings as proof but I know they happened and as you say who cares whether anyone believes anyway? The large cats in the wild still intrigue me.
 
Just to go back to my 'I ride horses' example re evidence.

I am not, currently, riding a horse. There are no photographs of me riding a horse (except the earlier stated one where I am eight and a blurry figure in the background on a palomino). My parents never saw me ride a horse (I went to a local riding school with a friend, and my parents weren't interested in horses, therefore never came to see me do it). I owned a horse, but kept him in a field with a friend's horse - that friend is now deceased. I am not in touch with any of the other people who would have seen me ride - recently I mostly rode alone, in the countryside, unseen apart from the odd witness whose name and address I didn't stop to catch.

Therefore, most of my horse-riding evidence is my first-hand testimony. Horses definitely exist, and I can definitely ride one, but you only have my word for that. Maybe I've never sat on a horse in my life. Proving it, one way or the other, would be very difficult. And yet...
 
catseye said:
Just to go back to my 'I ride horses' example re evidence.

I am not, currently, riding a horse. There are no photographs of me riding a horse (except the earlier stated one where I am eight and a blurry figure in the background on a palomino). My parents never saw me ride a horse (I went to a local riding school with a friend, and my parents weren't interested in horses, therefore never came to see me do it). I owned a horse, but kept him in a field with a friend's horse - that friend is now deceased. I am not in touch with any of the other people who would have seen me ride - recently I mostly rode alone, in the countryside, unseen apart from the odd witness whose name and address I didn't stop to catch.

Therefore, most of my horse-riding evidence is my first-hand testimony. Horses definitely exist, and I can definitely ride one, but you only have my word for that. Maybe I've never sat on a horse in my life. Proving it, one way or the other, would be very difficult. And yet...
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Bad analogy,there’s probably hundreds of thousands of pics of brits riding British horses in the British countryside,my sis has some,she used to ride.Any pics of leopard,puma,lion,tiger on the loose wandering around living freely in the British countryside is a whole different ball of wax.
 
Druk said:
Bad analogy,there’s probably hundreds of thousands of pics of brits riding British horses in the British countryside,my sis has some,she used to ride.Any pics of leopard,puma,lion,tiger on the loose wandering around living freely in the British countryside is a whole different ball of wax.
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Not really a bad analogy, it is a matter of scale. There are photos of other people riding horses in other places, so we know horses and horse-riders exist somewhere else. We have no evidence for Catseye with regard to horses and horse-riding. Likewise, we know big cats exist in other places, and we know other people see them. We have little or no evidence with regards to people seeing them in the UK. I've seen one, in the 1980s, but I have no evidence.
 
SimonBurchell said:
Not really a bad analogy, it is a matter of scale. There are photos of other people riding horses in other places, so we know horses and horse-riders exist somewhere else. We have no evidence for Catseye with regard to horses and horse-riding. Likewise, we know big cats exist in other places, and we know other people see them. We have little or no evidence with regards to people seeing them in the UK. I've seen one, in the 1980s, but I have no evidence.
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You worded it better than I :) we know brits ride Brit horses in the Brit countryside because there’s plenty of concrete proof of such.
 
catseye said:
Just to go back to my 'I ride horses' example re evidence.

I am not, currently, riding a horse. There are no photographs of me riding a horse (except the earlier stated one where I am eight and a blurry figure in the background on a palomino). My parents never saw me ride a horse (I went to a local riding school with a friend, and my parents weren't interested in horses, therefore never came to see me do it). I owned a horse, but kept him in a field with a friend's horse - that friend is now deceased. I am not in touch with any of the other people who would have seen me ride - recently I mostly rode alone, in the countryside, unseen apart from the odd witness whose name and address I didn't stop to catch.

Therefore, most of my horse-riding evidence is my first-hand testimony. Horses definitely exist, and I can definitely ride one, but you only have my word for that. Maybe I've never sat on a horse in my life. Proving it, one way or the other, would be very difficult. And yet...
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... if this was a thread about whether you'd ever ridden a horse, you'd say you did, we'd all say where's the evidence, you'd say 'ain't none,' and we'd say 'well, perhaps you have, or perhaps not, we'll never know. But it's a pretty mundane claim. We all know people do ride horses, for an actual fact.'

Then someone says they've seen a panther in the wild in the UK, and furthermore, that they believe there's enough evidence of big cats living wild in the UK that there must be a breeding population, or an awful lot of escaped or released unregistered big cats. And we all ask where the evidence is, and we get photos of things that look like domestic cats, or that aren't really clear enough to be identified as anything, and DNA from someone who inexplicably claims to have seen several (from her interview posted above) yet has never got definitive proof, and nobody else has had this remarkable success in tracking them down. And we say, 'Perhaps they're there, perhaps not. Anyone who is sure they've seen one will say they are. But why she we take that for granted?' Because it's not a mundane claim that a sizeable population of big cats is living in the wild in the UK, with no explanation (not assumption) as to how they got there and no definitive evidence with good provenance.

I'm not dismissing the claims. I'm here because I'm waiting for that evidence. And there is 'evidence', such that it is, or I wouldn't be here taking part in this conversation. I'd be ignoring the whole thing. But it's not good enough for me to be convinced.

And what would it take to convince me? That's usually the question I get next from people who want to make out that I'm actually incredibly biased and nothing would convince me, that I'll just dismiss all evidence in some way. But I'm not dismissing any evidence. Even the purely anecdotal is enough to catch my interest. I am biased against accepting extraordinary claims as true without very good evidence. I don't feel the need to apologise for that. What any one person finds convincing is their own choice. Likely, we won't know until we see it. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say a large population of big cats that's been living in the wilds of Britain now for decades without having been confirmed convincingly by the many people who have tried is an unlikely scenario. Whatever else might be going on to generate these reports, that shouldn't be our first assumption.
 
A big cat hunting couple from Gloucester released this pic last year which is proof big cats roam the uk they say,they have been tracking big cats in the uk for ten years :oops:
3F32C4F6-91E3-4A2D-A0A2-C4CE8E017587.jpeg
 
PeteByrdie said:
... if this was a thread about whether you'd ever ridden a horse, you'd say you did, we'd all say where's the evidence, you'd say 'ain't none,' and we'd say 'well, perhaps you have, or perhaps not, we'll never know. But it's a pretty mundane claim. We all know people do ride horses, for an actual fact.'

Then someone says they've seen a panther in the wild in the UK, and furthermore, that they believe there's enough evidence of big cats living wild in the UK that there must be a breeding population, or an awful lot of escaped or released unregistered big cats. And we all ask where the evidence is, and we get photos of things that look like domestic cats, or that aren't really clear enough to be identified as anything, and DNA from someone who inexplicably claims to have seen several (from her interview posted above) yet has never got definitive proof, and nobody else has had this remarkable success in tracking them down. And we say, 'Perhaps they're there, perhaps not. Anyone who is sure they've seen one will say they are. But why she we take that for granted?' Because it's not a mundane claim that a sizeable population of big cats is living in the wild in the UK, with no explanation (not assumption) as to how they got there and no definitive evidence with good provenance.

I'm not dismissing the claims. I'm here because I'm waiting for that evidence. And there is 'evidence', such that it is, or I wouldn't be here taking part in this conversation. I'd be ignoring the whole thing. But it's not good enough for me to be convinced.

And what would it take to convince me? That's usually the question I get next from people who want to make out that I'm actually incredibly biased and nothing would convince me, that I'll just dismiss all evidence in some way. But I'm not dismissing any evidence. Even the purely anecdotal is enough to catch my interest. I am biased against accepting extraordinary claims as true without very good evidence. I don't feel the need to apologise for that. What any one person finds convincing is their own choice. Likely, we won't know until we see it. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say a large population of big cats that's been living in the wilds of Britain now for decades without having been confirmed convincingly by the many people who have tried is an unlikely scenario. Whatever else might be going on to generate these reports, that shouldn't be our first assumption.
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It wasn't meant to be a direct comparison. Just an indication that proof is not always as easy to come by as some people seem to think. Even mundane things can't always be proven despite plenty of opportunity for proof to be obtained.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and all that. But people claim to see ghosts all the time - well, maybe not all the time, but you know what I mean. There is, as yet, absolutely no evidence that ghosts exist. Yet people are seeing something...
 
catseye said:
It wasn't meant to be a direct comparison. Just an indication that proof is not always as easy to come by as some people seem to think.
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Really? Because my post ended up really long and took ages. Can't you humour me and at least pretend I didn't waste my time?
 
maximus otter said:
Do we know that the sample sent for analysis was saliva? Is there anything to say that it wasn’t hair or droppings, for example?

maximus otter
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Good point.

I'm going to see what I can find out about this testing programme, our professor and the university involved

Here he is:

My research focuses on the evolution of plant domestication, looking for general principles across species. We aim to understand how crops came into being and to use genomes retrieved from archaeological samples (archaeogenomics) to elucidate the stages of the process in ‘real time’. To do this we use ancient DNA facilities at Warwick, and use a range of next generation technologies (MiSeq, NextSeq and NovaSeq) to generate genomes

PhD, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, 1996
BSc Hons, King's College London, 1991

Fellow of the Linnean Society
Fellow of the Society of Biologists
Associate Editor, PLosOne Journal
Associate Editor, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/people/rallaby/
 
Looking at his profile he is an accomplished academic and clearly an expert in DNA analysis. No mention of big cats on his profile though.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
Looking at his profile he is an accomplished academic and clearly an expert in DNA analysis. No mention of big cats on his profile though.
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Maybe he doesn't need to know anything about big cats - plug the DNA results into a database and get a species match (I have no idea if that is how it works).
 
PeteByrdie said:
Well then, I'm sorry, but unless you can produce clear photographic evidence, I don't believe horses exist.

But, yes, there are good reasons why clear photographs of a rare phenomenon might not be easy to find. However, that fact doesn't lend weight to the possibility that the phenomenon is real. It's like Russell's teapot. 'You wouldn't expect to see it,' doesn't lead to, 'therefore it's real.'

But, like I said, there's nothing inherently unlikely about big cats roaming the British countryside. In fact, it would seem weird if there hadn't been at least a couple over recent years. We know there have been such animals in captivity, other captive animals are known to have escaped, exotic felids have been found dead particularly, it seems, as roadkill. Then there was Felicity in Inverness in 1980. I'm highly sceptical of a large, perhaps breeding, population of big cats in the UK. I think the evidence would be more explicit, even indisputable. But, a handful of big cats, possibly. I just want clear evidence before saying definitely.
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If blurred photo's were a rare your point would be valid but they are not camera technology has improved massively and we have in out pockets devices that can take very clear pictures in all types of circumstances, except for Big Cats when for some unknown reason the photo's come out blurred and ambiguous, and please note that to be ambiguous is the first rule of Fortean type phenomena, in fact it's a clue that all is not as it first appears, it's the great trick it's been pulling for 1000's of year and people fall for it still!
 
From what we know:

"Larkin-Snowden took swabs from the sheep’s nose and back and front legs, and they were sent to a laboratory at the University of Warwick which specialises in testing for big cat DNA run by Prof Robin Allaby."

... it was either saliva or hair (but most likely saliva?)

Allaby is a plant geneticist but it seems they offer this DNA service, too.

Edit:

"Many people are convinced of the existence of large cats in the UK of the Panthera, Puma and Lynx genera. The folklore is that these may have been the refugees of the Dangerous Animals Act in 1976, and have found a niche in the UK countryside. In the beginning of 2012, my team was asked to investigate a possible cat kill on National Trust land, and the case received a lot of media attention at the time. This was a very young roe deer carcass. We took swabs and extracted DNA from bite wounds. There was sufficient interest in the subject that I decided to maintain a public support outreach program in which people can send samples they think might have cat DNA for testing.

The test also routinely tests for dogs and foxes, so is appropriate for cases in which the presence of these species may also want to be established. In the case of the big cats above, in fact it turned out that a fox was the more likely guilty party and any putative big cats were innocent on this occasion.

This service costs £100 - it is more than the bats because we test for both felids and canids, and the economies of scale mean we have to charge on a sample by sample basis. The appropriate types of sample should all be in a solid plastic container that can be popped into a jiffy bag in the post. Appropriate sample types are:

  1. Hair: snagged on a gate for instance.
  2. Scat: not all of it please, a slither is fine.
  3. Swab: ideally a sterile medical swab which is basically a cotton wool bud on a stick. Failing that, a cotton wool bud on a stick would do. A few wipes around bite wounds should be sufficient.
On no account send bits of dead body of prey in the post please. We will test for the presence of dogs/foxes and any of the cat species."

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/archaeobotany/ecological_forensics/cats/

The cost is an interesting factor as I feel many farmers and ramblers would be deterred by the fee but not a dedicated big cat researcher.

Also looking more saliva as otherwise I feel hair would have been mentioned by the witness.
 
It would have been possible to hoax this, although not straightforward by any means. I feel what happens now will be an indicator of its veracity. If this witness starts making more and bolder claims of big cat activity from that area eg there is more than one, she has seen one with cubs etc then I would be inclined to call shenanigans.
 
Paul_Exeter said:
From what we know:

"Larkin-Snowden took swabs from the sheep’s nose and back and front legs, and they were sent to a laboratory at the University of Warwick which specialises in testing for big cat DNA run by Prof Robin Allaby."

... it was either saliva or hair (but most likely saliva?)

Allaby is a plant geneticist but it seems they offer this DNA service, too.

Edit:

"Many people are convinced of the existence of large cats in the UK of the Panthera, Puma and Lynx genera. The folklore is that these may have been the refugees of the Dangerous Animals Act in 1976, and have found a niche in the UK countryside. In the beginning of 2012, my team was asked to investigate a possible cat kill on National Trust land, and the case received a lot of media attention at the time. This was a very young roe deer carcass. We took swabs and extracted DNA from bite wounds. There was sufficient interest in the subject that I decided to maintain a public support outreach program in which people can send samples they think might have cat DNA for testing.

The test also routinely tests for dogs and foxes, so is appropriate for cases in which the presence of these species may also want to be established. In the case of the big cats above, in fact it turned out that a fox was the more likely guilty party and any putative big cats were innocent on this occasion.

This service costs £100 - it is more than the bats because we test for both felids and canids, and the economies of scale mean we have to charge on a sample by sample basis. The appropriate types of sample should all be in a solid plastic container that can be popped into a jiffy bag in the post. Appropriate sample types are:

  1. Hair: snagged on a gate for instance.
  2. Scat: not all of it please, a slither is fine.
  3. Swab: ideally a sterile medical swab which is basically a cotton wool bud on a stick. Failing that, a cotton wool bud on a stick would do. A few wipes around bite wounds should be sufficient.
On no account send bits of dead body of prey in the post please. We will test for the presence of dogs/foxes and any of the cat species."

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/archaeobotany/ecological_forensics/cats/

The cost is an interesting factor as I feel many farmers and ramblers would be deterred by the fee but not a dedicated big cat researcher.

Also looking more saliva as otherwise I feel hair would have been mentioned by the witness.
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I have deducted marks for the use of the word 'slither'. He means 'sliver'.
 
Have listened to the episode:

https://bigcatconversations.com/ep110-panthera-cumbria-dna-developments/

She is in those fields with the permission of the landowner and one of the local farmers has seen it too (although we only have her word for this). She doesn't sound bonkers and wasn't making exaggerated claims, although I do feel she would be prone to identifying glimpses of dogs and foxes as big cats
 
A few random musings:

Animals are notoriously difficult to get close to - it's what makes wildlife photography and hunting so difficult. Nobody is going to stumble on a big cat just lying there in the sun. Anybody going for a walk through the countryside may have a modern phone with them but they're only good at shorter ranges. Taking a photo of a big cat stalking in a field half a mile away is going to give you a blurry pic due to the digital zoom. Also cats are most active hunting at dawn or dusk and as such any pics would be under low light conditions.

Foxes exist all over the UK countryside in vast numbers but most people only see them when they stray into towns. Where are all the hundereds of phone pics of foxes from Sunday walks in the hills? Now imagine there were only a few foxes in the whole of the UK. How many phone pics would you expect?

There are lots of bears in the Swedish countryside. I used to hunt regularly in bear territory but have never seen one. Doesn't mean they're not there.

@maximus otter Do you carry any camera gear when hunting? I only ever have binocuars for spotting and my mobile phone.


Big cat fact: There are more tigers kept as private pets in the US than there are living wild in the rest of the world. There are fewer than 4,000 in the wild and estimates for the US are 5000+. Texas alone has upwards of 2500.
 
Ringo said:
Taking a photo of a big cat stalking in a field half a mile away is going to give you a blurry pic due to the digital zoom.
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Two points from that, your not going to recognise a leopard from half a mile away with the naked eye and every single pic of a big cat in the UK IS blurry.
(I have seen bears in Nepal and Canada).
 
Druk said:
Two points from that, your not going to recognise a leopard from half a mile away with the naked eye and every single pic of a big cat in the UK IS blurry.
(I have seen bears in Nepal and Canada).
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Exactly. People won't get close to them or they won't recognise them far away. If they do recognise something in a field as strange then their 5 year old Android phone isn't going to help at a distance. Half a mile was an exaggeration on my behalf.

I'm guessing that most sigtings are of black puma-like cats. Has anyone reported fawn, spotted or striped big cats?

I don't really see a population of big cats existing in the UK, maybe one or two exotic pets who were released. But how they would survive generationally I don't know.
 
Ringo said:
A few random musings:

Animals are notoriously difficult to get close to - it's what makes wildlife photography and hunting so difficult. Nobody is going to stumble on a big cat just lying there in the sun. Anybody going for a walk through the countryside may have a modern phone with them but they're only good at shorter ranges. Taking a photo of a big cat stalking in a field half a mile away is going to give you a blurry pic due to the digital zoom. Also cats are most active hunting at dawn or dusk and as such any pics would be under low light conditions.

Foxes exist all over the UK countryside in vast numbers but most people only see them when they stray into towns. Where are all the hundereds of phone pics of foxes from Sunday walks in the hills? Now imagine there were only a few foxes in the whole of the UK. How many phone pics would you expect?

There are lots of bears in the Swedish countryside. I used to hunt regularly in bear territory but have never seen one. Doesn't mean they're not there.

@maximus otter Do you carry any camera gear when hunting? I only ever have binocuars for spotting and my mobile phone.


Big cat fact: There are more tigers kept as private pets in the US than there are living wild in the rest of the world. There are fewer than 4,000 in the wild and estimates for the US are 5000+. Texas alone has upwards of 2500.
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You make some good poinrts. I have been able to get close to foxes and deer whilst walking quietly in the countryside and finding myself upwind of them (more than chance than design). My attempt to photograph them using my phone camera have been hopeless, at best a blurred pic of something on four legs and essentially you get one shot - if you are lucky - and they are gone. Yes, if I can in a hide for a few hours with a decent camera I might get a decent shot but how many people are prepared to do that?

Urban foxes are less wary and I whilst on a train I once saw one in broad daylight sat on a patch of grass in the middle of the busy railway junction outside Portsmouth & Southsea station
 
Paul_Exeter said:
You make some good poinrts. I have been able to get close to foxes and deer whilst walking quietly in the countryside and finding myself upwind of them (more than chance than design). My attempt to photograph them using my phone camera have been hopeless, at best a blurred pic of something on four legs and essentially you get one shot - if you are lucky - and they are gone. Yes, if I can in a hide for a few hours with a decent camera I might get a decent shot but how many people are prepared to do that?

Urban foxes are less wary and I whilst on a train I once saw one in broad daylight sat on a patch of grass in the middle of the busy railway junction outside Portsmouth & Southsea station
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I live in the middle of the countryside and regularly see deer (often very close up, they burst out of the undergrowth right in front of me. One jumped right over me and my dog once!) hares, foxes, badgers, stoats etc etc. Guess how many good photographs I have of any of these. Go on, guess (clue, it's less than one).
 
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