A roadworker has filmed what he described as a “six-foot long”, large black panther-like cat in Cambridgeshire – but, as ever with big cat sightings in the UK, doubts remain.
Jason Dobney had pulled into a lay-by last Sunday (10 November) morning just outside of Baston, north of Peterborough, with a work colleague when they spotted the animal walking along the edge of a field.
“It was about the size of a rottweiler,” Dobney told BBC Countryfile Magazine. “It had a very muscley front, like an American bulldog, it definitely wasn’t a house cat. It was fixated on walking along, I’d say it was prowling.”
Dobney and his colleague watched it for about 10 minutes – it walked into the middle of a field, but then suddenly disappeared.
British big cat expert – and host of the Big Cat Conversations podcast – Rick Minter said the cat was most likely to have been a leopard, which can vary in size, with females smaller than males. “The movement makes me uncertain as it’s not clearly showing a heavy and deliberate predator, but the form is possibly of a large black cat like a leopard,” he said.
At the distance the video was taken, he said it wasn’t possible to see the “characteristic rounded ears”, while the tail did appear to be “proportionately long at some angles”.
But not everyone who has seen the video, or stills from it, is convinced the animal is a big cat. Dobney posted the footage on a big cat Facebook group, and many responses suggested it was just a large domestic cat.
Contacted by BBC Countryfile, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Big Cats Program, Dr Luke Hunter described the creature as a “well-fed but otherwise totally typical moggie.”
It was a very common error, he said, to see animals in landscapes as bigger than they really are.
“Just yesterday, I was driving through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland when I saw a cat sitting a distant meadow,” he continued. “I immediately thought, ‘Lynx!’, and it took me a few moments to scale things – some carrion crows in the foreground helped – and I realised it was much smaller than my first, over excited impression. It was a domestic cat.”
Dobney said he had a long-standing interest in big cats in Britain, having grown up in North Devon where he frequently heard stories about them, but had never seen one before.
