In 1995, government inspectors spent months on Bodmin moor in Cornwall looking for evidence of a 'beast' roaming wild there. They found nothing. Yet every year there are 2,000 similarly spurious big-cat sightings in Britain. What's going on? There is scarcely a self-respecting borough in Britain which does not now possess a Beast. Even the London suburbs claim to be infested with big cats: there is a Beast of Barnet, a Beast of Cricklewood, a Crystal Palace Puma and a Sydenham Panther. There have been occasional reports of mysterious British cats throughout history, but over the past few years the sightings have boomed. In her book Mystery Big Cats, Merrily Harpur finds that "cat-flaps", as she calls them, are occurring at the rate of 2,000 to 4,000 a year. Harpur notes that around three-quarters of all the cats reported are black, and they are commonly described as glossy and muscular. She also makes the fascinating observation that while the most likely candidate is a melanistic leopard (the leopard is the species in which the black form, though rare, occurs most often) she has not been able to find a single account of an ordinary, spotted leopard seen in the wild in Britain. Some species of large cat are among the shyest and most cunning of all wild animals, but they are creatures of regular habits. They have territories, dens in which cubs are raised, spraying points and scratching posts. They scatter prints, dung and hairs wherever they go: the first are immediately recognisable, the provenance of the second and third can be confirmed by DNA testing. We love big cat sightings stories. But sadly, they never turn out to have much to go on. A sighting is reported but none of the physical evidence is found. Disappointing. The author says there SHOULD be way more evidence than we are seeing. There have been several failed organized attempts to capture the beast and we get nothing. The prints are from dogs, the photographs are never good enough. But as we've noted before, this is not too hard to believe that cats are here. But we are having some trouble documenting them and explaining how they got here. The article above has lots of extra links to other information. Check it out. «-»«-»«-»«-» Ignore Tags “animal planet” "bbc Natural World Documentary" “bbc world documentary” “discovery channel documentary” "hbo " "history channel documentaries" "top documentary films" "great documentaries" "good documentaries" ""pbs documentary" “NOVA documentary” "national geographic documentary" "full documentary Wild" "tlc documentary" "discovery education” “knowledge based document” "documentary channel” "bbc2 documentary" "bbc documentary" "animal planet documentary" "nat geo wild" "wildlife documentary" “nature documentary”

• published: 06 Nov 2014
• views: 1