This is interesting...
Not a credible sighting? Was it not shot dead? Was a body examined? If the shot cat wasn't a leopard after all, why is it listed as a leopard? Please don't tell me we may have reports of shot cats that were never recovered.
William, I think it has to be seen in the context of Aspinall's zoo activities in the area. There were a number of escapes from there, into the Kent countryside, which as I'm sure you know is very intensively farmed and quit densely populated. It's "the garden of England". Local people were actually a bit paranoid about it all at the time, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone reported one of these "it's not as big as it looks" cat sightings, and it was at first attributed to Aspinall's activities, and some wires got crossed.
The other context is of course the absolutely
dreadful quality of the DEFRA document. This is a million miles from the sort of data usually produced by that department. I linked earlier to the VIDA statistics. These are meticulously maintained and checked, and every so often I get someone on my doorstep asking me about a VIDA code assignment on something I've done, pointing out an irregularity, and asking me to clarify. That's how the work is routinely done.
In contrast that table isn't even dated. We don't know when "the present day" relates to. It's
full of errors that can easily be identified simply on a cursory inspection. That's why I believe it was something hastily cobbled together for a specific purpose, some time in 2001 or soon after, and never looked at again. The heading suggests the specific purpose to me. It looks like an FoI request. It looks like something sketchily assembled simply to comply with that request.
I'm guessing where the source material came from, but I've a shrewd suspicion that someone was able to source a handful of press clippings about big cats discovered in the countryside, and just sat down and banged in what was there, guessing approximate dates. It must have been done very hurriedly, because it didn't take me long at all to spot the duplications, and the "date of capture" of 1950 is also a glaring typo.
So all that note against the Kent leopard story suggests to me is that the minion doing this had a garbled press report relating to something Aspinall may or may not have been responsible for, and just typed in a little caveat note without making any further enquiries. I don't imagine the writer spent more than half an hour on the whole thing.
Which is why I think Marduk might be disappointed with the result of his FoI enquiry. Such enquiries are usually made by people who think the government department has a specific document or set of records. If they're right, then hopefully the document will be released. But if nobody really knows what they're talking about, or the information simply doesn't exist in the form in which it is requested, then this is the sort of amateur abortion likely to be handed over.
That table may have been of use to someone. I suspect it's actually pretty complete. Once you've realised that the Norfolk incident in the table is probably the same one as the Suffolk incident Marduk listed, the only one of his six that's missing is the one in Northern Ireland, which might not have been covered by the original data-trawl. Once you've looked at what's there, there are about 11 reports that aren't either obviously Aspinall, or Marduk's six. Searching for further information about these might reveal more - some of them are almost certainly well-documented zoo or wildlife park escapes. What we can say though, even with that poor-quality information, is that there is no particular area of the country which is more likely than another to be involved in such a report (except Kent!), and there is no one species repeatedly being turned up. This therefore argues quite strongly against there being a breeding population of any species in any part of the country.
Rolfe.
