The West Midlands is the latest part of the UK to become the focus of claims of exotic big cats roaming loose in the countryside.
A video has been released that is said to show a “panther” (a black leopard, in other words) running through a field in the half darkness in an unspecified location near the border between Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.
Local Martin Burford took the video a year ago, but has only just released it. He claims to regularly see panthers following the lines of the rivers, and he also took a photo of a lamb carcass that he said had been killed by a big cat.
But does the video live up to expectations and show a big cat in the British countryside?
BBC Countryfile contacted Dr Luke Hunter, executive director of the Big Cats Program at the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), one of the world’s foremost conservation groups, to get an independent view.
“It’s a moggy,” Hunter says. “The gait is very much a small cat’s, not a leopard or another big cat’s.”
Like many professional conservationists and other wildlife experts, Hunter is sceptical of the idea there is a population of large cats such as leopards in the British countryside. “It amazes me that these claims persist,” says Hunter. “If there were big cats in the UK countryside, it would be almost unavoidable that unequivocal evidence would emerge.”
Some strong evidence – though arguably not conclusive beyond all doubt – did emerge in May when the DNA of a cat in the Panthera genus was found on a swab taken from a sheep carcass in Cumbria. In 2022, a hair found on barbed wire in Gloucestershire was identified as belonging to a leopard.
Persistent rumours of non-native cats in Britain go back to the introduction of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act in 1976. The new law forced private individuals who owned exotic animals such as big cats, but many other species as well, to either get the animal properly licensed, hand them over to a zoo or have them put down. Many people, it’s argued, simply let them go.
Over the years, there’s been the Surrey Puma and the beasts of Bodmin and Exmoor and even the beast of Woodchester, a small village in the Cotswolds near Stroud. Gloucestershire has become a hotspot for sightings, perhaps because of the work of a dedicated big cat hunter called Frank Tunbridge – but even he accepts that definitive proof has so far proved elusive.
Sceptics, meanwhile, argue that the idea of a self-sustaining big cat population in Britain is nonsensical – there simply isn’t sufficient good habitat or prey (other than livestock) to support big cats.
Despite this, it is likely that claims they are here will continue – maybe one day something that can’t be disputed will emerge, but no one can know for sure.
