I wasn't going to give details about last year's incident(s), but why not? It's not a state secret, no matter what Danny thinks. I can't get the exact dates and so on without searching the records, which I can't be bothered doing, but hey, it's lunchtime, so here's what happened as well as I can remember.
The shepherd from our own farm, right on the doorstep, showed up with the carcase of a ewe. He brings in almost every fatality he has, because of Home Office regs - a lot of his groups are on official feeding trials and things (OMG! vivisection! ban it!) and they're pretty strict about having fatalities properly investigated. This one was gruesome though, it was a classic throat-torn-out suffocation job. The excision was so neat he thought it might have been done by a human with a knife. He didn't find the missing flesh, but he did find the plastic ear tag from the missing ear, lying by itself a few feet from the body. The way it had been chewed suggested the missing tissue might have been eaten.
We got as far as determining that was no knife involved, and that it was a predator. I don't recall if we skinned her to check for claw marks or not. If it happens again I certainly will - this forum is a great resource! However, there was certainly no meat missing and the fleece was intact and unmarked. Whatever had killed her had not tried to eat her - only her right ear and her larynx.
I'd literally just got out of the PM room when I was called to the door to deal with a policeman. He had a bunch of photographs in his hand. The PM room attendant said, hey, how did you get photos of our sheep?? I pointed out that our ewe had been a Suffolk, and this was a Greyface. The policeman said the photos had been taken in Fife, the previous day, and he'd been sent to ask if it could be a big cat killing.
(At this point I tried to contact a retired local pathologist who has special expertise in these cases, the guy who looked at Charlotte the Sheep in fact, but he was away. When I got hold of him later, he confirmed from the photos that death was due to asphyxiation from the death grip, and the lack of bleeding was because the ewes were dead before the larynx was actually ripped out.)
So, we had a discussion about it - the shepherd, the policeman and the vets. Fife and Midlothian are separated by a big body of water, and we all agreed that it was physically impossible for an animal without access to a motor vehicle to have carried out both attacks. Thus, it was either two separate free-living animals, or one animal with access to a motor vehicle.
We considered the former possibility first. The policeman said that there had been big cat "sightings" in Fife, but we'd had none in Midlothian. We thought about the possibility of there being a loose cat in either location, and realised it wouldn't fly (unless the cat could fly!). Fife is low-lying and intensively farmed. One mouthful of larynx wouldn't keep anything going for very long, and they'd had no other reports of dead sheep. The same was really true for our own area. Although we have a big area of wild country right on our doorstep, and indeed the field the ewe had been in was on the edge of the wild country, it's still farmed. We have hill sheep and beef cattle up there, and the stockmen keep an eye on them and record any losses. There are also gamekeepers looking after the grouse shooting. Nobody had reported any unusual losses, or any devoured carcasses lying around. The hills are also very open, with little cover, and in spite of shepherds, gamekeepers and quite a lot of hillwalkers, there were no Danny-style "sightings" on record.
So we decided that if either case was the work of a big cat, it was a big cat which had only just arrived. Paradoxically, it was the double occurrence that was reassuring. If it had only been one, we'd have been seriously considering the possibility of a newly-released big cat (even though there isn't a zoo near here), and waiting for the next body to show up. However, the likelihood of two big cats appearing simultaneously in two separate counties was stretching credulity. We concluded that as we had two, it was either something common enough to happen in two places independently, or the same animal taken from one location to another in a vehicle. Both of these possibilities led to the same conclusion - dog. (The shepherd kept talking about badgers, but I didn't really buy that myself.)
I thought it was either the case that one dog had learned this particular killing grip, and the owner had taken it to Fife the previous day, or that the technique was quite a common canine attack method. However, I haven't seen another one since, so it seems to have been a coincidence whichever way you look at it.
More cases did appear, but they were different. Later in the summer the same shepherd came in with a big Suffolk lamb, newly dead. He said he'd seen it looking ill and breathing badly, and had taken it inside and given it antibiotics. However, he found it dead next time he checked. He was worried about pneumonia.
This lamb had suffered one single powerful bite to the flank, with the teeth apparently having taken hold round the end of the rib cage. There was a tear in the skin, the body wall was intact, but the rumen and the diaphragm were both ruptured. There were rumen contents in the chest, which is why the lamb had been breathing badly. There was one other skin-deep bite on the hindquarters.
About the same time a farmer from East Lothian came in with a lamb in his trailer. He said he'd gone out in the morning to find at least half a dozen lambs lying dead, and many of the remainder looking ill. He'd loaded up this one, apparently the sickest of the survivors, for us to find out what was going on, but it had died in transit. This lamb had also suffered bite wounds to the abdomen which had penetrated the intestines. This time there were numerous smaller bites, and when we skinned the lamb we found a lot of skin-deep teeth marks on the rump and hind limbs.
Oddly, when I made my report, the farmer didn't believe me, but by the time he received the report the knacker had already collected the other carcasses. A phone call to the knacker's yard elicited the information that there were no bite wounds visible, but there hadn't been on the one we'd seen either - they were only visible once the lamb was skinned. I asked if we could have another one, but as the others were all recovering the farmer was understandably reluctant. I told him to inform the police.
Some time passed, and then the third local case occurred. I got in one morning to be told that our shepherd was already on the doorstep with a casualty, and it was horrific. He had gone to do his usual morning inspection and found a full-grown gimmer trying to stand, but obviously injured. She had no muscle or connective tissue between the stifle and the hock of her left hind leg. The intact tibia was the only thing holding on the rest of the leg and the foot. The shepherd had immediately got his needle and killed the sheep on humane grounds. There wasn't another mark on her, but there wasn't a hunk of meat lying on the grass either. I've still got that leg in the freezer. We told the cops, because we were concerned that a dog that could do that to a sheep could do the same to a child, but they didn't seem all that interested.
These were all the ones I dealt with myself, but I think there was at least one more, possibly two, that colleagues saw. There have been none for some time though. I'm fairly sure that the East Lothian one was a separate incident, with a completely different modus operandi. However all the Midlothian ones I saw, all from our own farm, looked like a dog with very powerful jaws that was into giving one huge bite, then running off with whatever it had in its mouth. The first case, the throat-torn-out, had looked very expert, but it didn't manage to that again.
The real oddity was the Fife one, with the identical injury just two days before our one. Quite a coincidence whichever way you look at it. Either two dogs happened to do exactly the same (very unusual) thing almost simultaneously and never again, or our dog was taken to Fife by its owner and pulled off the only two perfectly-executed throat-rips of its life (that we know of) in the two locations. There have been no other casualties reported from Fife since then.
So there's why I'm as sure as I reasonably can be that there isn't a big cat stalking the Pentland Hills, or even Fife. Not because we haven't had suspicious injuries, because we have, but because the amount of unaccounted-for meat around here wouldn't keep a toy poodle alive. Even the ones that are found dead of disease or accident only have evidence of carrion bird scavenging.
I think there's a sheep-worrying Rottweiler somewhere round here, and I hope the next thing it bites isn't human.
Unless, of course, we have an invisible ghost panther that only slips through the interdimensional void to have one quick chomp, then disappears again....
Rolfe.
