Merged Alien Big Cats in the UK?

Rolfe said:
There's a cracker of a photo of Felicity, by the way.

This picture was taken in the middle of Edinburgh, in Chambers Street. This is Felicity after her death (from old age) in the wildlife park, and subsequent appointment with the taxidermist. The taxidermy was carried out in Edinburgh, and the photo posed before she was returned to the museum in Inverness where I believe she is still on exhibition.
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Coincidentally, I just had lunch in the building behind where stuffed Felicity is sitting in the photo. It's right next door to the Edinburgh Sheriff Court, and I was supposed to be giving evidence there in a deer poaching case thisd morning (adjourned again, what a waste of 4 :rule10 hours sitting in a waiting room).

The bench isn't there any more. The building is the old Edinburgh dental hospital, but it's now an upmarket food-serving pub sort of place called Revolution. Right across the road is the Edinburgh Museum of Natural History, which did the taxidermy job on Felicity.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
Note that the people reporting these sightings are almost all inexpert passers-by. The real wildlife experts who study what is living in the countryside don't report such things. Just ask Simon King. And there is no reason at all for anyone to cover up the presence of such animals, if they were really there. Quite the contrary - they'd be an absolute star turn on Springwatch.
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To be fair I don't think anybody ever claims a cover-up in in the case of ABCs. It has the absolute opposite problem from the likes of UFOs, Ghosts or the like in so much as the wildlife experts tend to have to explain why ABCs are not likely, but there are a lot of utterly convinced leypeople who just accept their presence.

I do think, that as you rightly point out "big" cats often give the wrong impression. It suggests that a breeding population would be a tiger or leopard, where as we would more reasonably expect something akin to the scottish wildcats. Which if they WERE around, people might not recognise as feral. I have been walking around Howletts while other visitors complained loudly that some breeds of wildcats should not be kept in cages "but should be in your home where they belong". Something considerably larger than a domestic breed, that would feed on vermin and small prey, can apparently be mistaken for a domestic breed. Which suggests that if it were seen in a field or woodland may not be recognised as an ABC.

But again there remains the difference (the vast difference) between isolated examples and breeding populations of ABCs "Inhabiting" Kent, or anywhere else.
 
The thing is, if there were breeding colonies of exotic cats in Britain, people like Simon King would know. This is the guy that found a wild Felis sylvestris and filmed it so well you could count the whiskers. And did it so fast that they had to find something else to hype up for the remaining weeks of the programme.

There are really three different phenomena here. One is the real escapes, which are generally rounded up and removed from the environment quite quickly. Another is real mauled animals, but these are sporadic and don't provide enough sustenance to keep a free-living animal going. Usually the animal is bitten and killed, but not eaten. This is quite typical of dog-worrying. And the last is the "sightings". These tend to be of black animals said to be larger than any Felis domesticus could possibly be, but not to fit the description of a known species of big cat. And they don't dovetail either spatially or contemporaneously with either the known escapees or the apparently abandoned dinners.

Rolfe.
 
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Rolfe said:
And the last is the "sightings". These tend to be of black animals said to be larger than any Felis domesticus could possibly be, but not to fit the description of a known species of big cat.
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I think it is interesting that when photos are provided with "big cat" sightings they are almost universally black moggies. We almost never see other colors. But it can't be that all the feral or roaming moggies are black. It seems that there is something about a black moggie that triggers a subset of the population into thinking that they are seeing a "big cat". Surely there must also be many people who see the same cat and correctly identify it as what it is.

There is no confirmatory evidence of any wild "big cats" in the UK. All of the presented photo evidence shows moggies. This is good proof that people will see a moggie and then indeed claim "big cat". This is grounds for the suspicion that sighting claims without photos are probably just more of the same. Things would be quite different if people occasionally produced genuine "big cat" evidence... but they don't.
 
I think there's something about the featureless black silhouette that makes it easier for the optical illusion to occur that makes the cat seem bigger than it really is. It's happened to me a couple of times, but on both occasions the cat was still there when I did the "double-take", and I could see it was just a moggie.

Stripes or patches of colour tend to make the size easier to gauge at first sight. Also, patched coats don't say "big cat" at all - it would really have to be a tabby or an agouti to fool anyone.

Rolfe.
 
50-100 big cats loose in Wales? :rolleyes:

I would believe that there were one or two released recently and the missing sheep etc. have not caught up with them yet.
 
Cuddles said:
Um, I'm not convinced that's the right link.

That's from 2003.
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catsmate1 said:
Ooops.:o

ETA: Heres' the Mail link: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-154625/Are-panthers-roaming-Wales.html
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I had to get the 2003 date out of the metadata on the BBC article. The Mail article looks like another version of the same thing. I can't find a date on that but I think today's date on the top is just a current-day thing - the BBC page also has today's date on the top. I'm suspicious that the Mail article is of the same 2003 vintage.

And as always we finish up with that Danny loon spouting off about all these pumas he knows about, and nobody ever calls him on it.

Rolfe.
 
Wildlife expert Danny Nineham, who has been studying big cats sightings in Britain, said: "Dusk is lucky to have survived.
"Big cats are not domestic animals, they live every day by killing. If they don't kill on a daily basis they cannot survive.
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"According to experts." And who would these "experts" be, again? Right, Danny. Again.

He's got the second bit right though. He just seems to imagine that one dead sheep per puma per day is something the farmers would just not notice! You only have to look at the events where a big cat really did get loose to realise that the trail of corpses becomes a very big issue, very quickly.

That dog was bitten by another dog, or a fox, or a badger.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
I had to get the 2003 date out of the metadata on the BBC article. The Mail article looks like another version of the same thing. I can't find a date on that but I think today's date on the top is just a current-day thing - the BBC page also has today's date on the top. I'm suspicious that the Mail article is of the same 2003 vintage.

And as always we finish up with that Danny loon spouting off about all these pumas he knows about, and nobody ever calls him on it.

Rolfe.
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I got the Mail link using the Google 'last 24 hours' search option so I'd expect it to be recent.
 
A domestic cat, hunting small prey as its only source of food can easily exterminate all small prey for a square mile. A breeding population of pumas would need to eat too. Not just the odd sheep, but the dead rabbits, badgers, foxes, game birds and "food" would be increasingly obvious as the population expanded.

An aspect I hadn't considered before rolfe, so cheers for applying some critical nounce to the claims.
 
Proof!

picture.php


ETA: You should note that this photo is evidently from BEFORE PHOTOSHOP!!1!1!!
 
Evolved Wookie said:
Proof!

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=459&pictureid=5038[/qimg]

ETA: You should note that this photo is evidently from BEFORE PHOTOSHOP!!1!1!!
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I remember that documentary very well from the early 70s, and yet we still don't have appropriate measure in place to deal with big cats in the UK! It's a disgrace!!
 
catsmate1 said:
I got the Mail link using the Google 'last 24 hours' search option so I'd expect it to be recent.
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Rolfe is correct that it looks like the same report as the BBC article - same names and location - and the article number suggests it is rather old - 154625 compared to over 2,000,000 for current articles.

As for the Sun article, I'm with Rolfe again. From the article:
It's a trait of theirs to attack the neck and face
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It's a trait of pretty much everything with teeth to attack the neck and face. For fairly obvious reasons really. Here's an excerpt from the Wiki article on badgers:
Dogs usually suffer injuries of the face and neck.
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