The spreadsheet.
Probable provenance. In 2001 or soon afterwards, an FoI request is received for all "Reports received by DEFRA of escapes of non-native cats in the UK, 1975 to present day." Well, dammit, DEFRA doesn't collect this information. Oops, might look bad if we say that straight out, can we collect some now? Somehow, a selection of press clippings on the subject is assembled, and someone gets the job of tabulating these.
Some of the reports are quite specific, like no. 11, which related to a parliamentary question, but others are lacking in essential details. The minion assigned the task decides on a few headings, and starts inputting data. However, he often just has to enter a month or even just a year, and Excel converts all these to the first of the month or the first of January. The reports are often unclear on the exact date of "escape" and/or "capture", and in some of these cases he just puts the same month (or just the year) down in both columns.
He doesn't actually notice that he has two reports relating to each of three cases, and three reports relating to one more case, and as the data he enters are slightly different each time, they appear as if they were separate incidents. He doesn't even notice that he's managed to enter one of the capture dates as 1950. He just orders the list according to the "date escaped" column, and hands it in. Job done. And if the recipient was disappointed, then we have no record of that.
If we strike off the duplicates, and strike off the Aspinall escapes, we have 16 cases left.
3. Felicity, who was a puma, in Invernesshire in 1980
5. An ocelot in Lancashire in 1981
6. A jaguar in north Wales in 1982
7. A lion in Norfolk in 1984
9. A leopard cat in the Borders in 1987
12. A puma in Leicesteshire in 1988
13. A leopard cat in Devon in 1988
15. A jungle cat in Hampshire in 1988
16. A jungle cat in Shropshire in 1989
17. A lynx in Norfolk in 1991
18. A lion in Humberside in 1991
19. A snow leopard in Hertfordshire in 1994.
20. A lynx in Oxford in 1996.
21. An asiatic golden cat in Somerset in 1997.
22. A leopard cat on the Isle of Wight in 1987, or 1994, or maybe even 1993.
24. A lynx in London in 2001.
The information is so sketchy, that all it could really serve is as a basis for hunting up more details from other sources - maybe finding the original reports used to compile this list. Details have already been posted as regards 3, 16, 21 and 24. It's also quite likely that the list is incomplete. For a start, two of the reports Marduk included in his original post seem to be missing (the lynx in Suffolk in 1991 and the other lynx in Northern Ireland in 1996).
Still, is there anything there that might support the suggestion of the presence of a breeding colony of any of the species concerned?
There are five lynxes, if we add the other two from Marduk's reports, but they are quite widely scattered. Northern Ireland, Oxford, Norfolk, Suffolk and London. The one in Suffolk appears to have been loose for only two weeks, the one in London maybe for two hours, and the one in Northern Ireland even had a collar on.
There are three leopard cats listed, but they could hardly be more widely separated - the Borders, Devon, and the Isle of Wight. The last in particular is a highly unlikely location for a breeding colony of anything like that.
There are two jungle cats, in Hampshire and Shropshire.
There are two pumas, in Invernesshire and Leicestershire.
There are two lions, in Norfolk and Humberside.
And there are four species which appear only once each - ocelot, jaguar, snow leopard and asiatic golden cat.
So, if Marduk wants to make a case for a breeding population of any of these, then I'd be interested to hear it.
The lynx seems most promising, with five individuals, but as I pointed out, the three we have better details of are unlikely candidates. You might decide to look a bit more closely at the Norfolk/Suffolk thing, it could be your best chance. So, one lynx in a report Marduk posted, in Suffolk in 1991, which is unaccountably missing from the DEFRA list, and one lynx in Suffolk in 1991 which is present in the DEFRA list. I'd put money on these actually being the same case, given the lamentable lack of accuracy in the DEFRA list. And that one was only loose for two weeks. The London and the Northern Ireland ones were obviously escaped "pets", and we know nothing about the Oxford one except that Oxford is quite a long way from Suffolk.
The leopard cats are widely separated, as I said, and anyway, even if a breeding population of these had managed to get established, why on earth would anyone want to hush it up? They're not much bigger than domestic cats, and quite commonly kept as pets. A feral colony would be no more remarkable than feral mink.
The two jungle cats seem to have been unlucky, both apparently roadkill, but again they were in quite different parts of the country.
Two pumas. Felicity in Invernesshire and one in Leicestershire eight years later. Some breeding colony! We don't know anything about the second one, a fuller report might tell us of an escape from a zoo or something like that.
And two lions. If anyone would like to tell us about the breeding prides of lions roaming the savannah between Norfolk and Humberside, I'd love to hear about it.
So if that's your evidence, I think it's a bit on the incomplete side. Still, it's another 11 leads to follow up to see if you can find out what's behind these sketchy snippets. I'd submit that the pattern of the data suggests nothing more than sporadic escapes of captive specimens though, most of which didn't stay out for long.
Rolfe.
