Britain has got a new Environment Secretary, Therese Coffey, who told farmers the other day that she wasn’t particularly enamoured with the long-standing idea of reintroducing lynx to the wilder bits of the countryside of Scotland, England and Wales.
The big cats were once native to these isles but since they and wolves were hunted to extinction in medieval times, officially, Britain has no true apex predator - foxes, otters, owls and eagles. No wonder the deer population is reportedly the highest it's been since Henry VIII’s reign.
But Therese Coffey’s doubts and the farmers’ objections make me smile. Because I know the countryside of Britain does already contain an apex predator - the puma.
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Yes, the puma. Some call them panthers, some cougars, but it’s basically the same thing - the smallest of the big cat family that includes lions and tigers, and yes, they live among us in the countryside around Bristol, in Wiltshire, Somerset, Gloucestershire, the Forest of Dean, Devon, the mountains of Wales, Cornwall and rural Dorset.
Most people simply refuse to believe this. They say it’s not possible, they may mock people who come forward and say they’ve seen one. They pour scorn on the blurry photos of a black cat-shaped blob in a field, taken hurriedly on a phone from 200 yards away.
I’m not here to convince you they exist. I don’t even care what others think. This isn’t even a case of me saying I believe they exist. I don’t ‘believe’ it, like it’s an article of faith. For me, it’s a simple fact. I know they exist. I’ve seen one. I’ve spoken to so many people who have also seen one and many more who’ve seen the kind of evidence that could only be as a result of the presence of a large cat living in the countryside of the West Country, that it’s no longer a matter of conjecture. For me it’s not even up for debate. You can say ‘I don’t believe you’ if you like and that’s fine. You can start arguing why there aren’t or can’t be big cats living in the countryside of the West Country if you like, but I’ll just shrug and let you continue.
For 15 years I was a reporter for the Bristol Post’s sister paper, the Western Daily Press, and was given the rather grand but ultimately meaningless title of ‘countryside correspondent’. That basically meant I reported on foxhunting and rural issues, and over the years, many, many reports of sightings of big cats.
There has also been official acknowledgement that this is a real thing. Just after the turn of the Millennium, the Forestry Commission reported one of its staff was surveying wild boar numbers with night vision equipment and watched a large cat watch the boar’s herd. Several times, I spoke to or heard about pilots who fly various air ambulances and police helicopters who spotted and tracked large cats moving around the fields at night.
Some of the more memorable reports I investigated included a chicken farmer who came face to face with a panther that had got into his long shed by digging underneath the end wall. I inspected the scene down in Somerset and it will stay with me forever. The shed had a door at one end, and a row of around six large chicken coups raised off the ground with floorboards and a corridor running along the left hand side. At the far end, where the seventh coup would be was a store area. Underneath this, an animal had got in by scraping away beneath the wooden wall at the end, but then found itself unable to get into the actual coups. The farmer reckoned it had spent a night underneath his poor chickens. The claw marks on the wooden boards were around twice the size of a fox’s paw.
When he walked in through the door in the morning, he froze as the cat froze too, underneath the boards by his right ankle at the end of the corridor. He backed away slowly as the cat, thinking it was cornered, searched for a way out. The farmer was still in shock when I spoke to him.
Most of the stories I heard were from people who just told me and said they didn’t want a report in the paper, they just wanted to share it with someone who wouldn’t laugh at them. There was the good friend of mine, a sober and straight churchwarden, who told me quietly one Sunday that the previous morning he’d been up walking his dog, which raced towards a thicket in a field half a mile from town and came racing back. He looked in awe as a large dark panther emerged from the other side of the thicket around 15 yards from him and strolled off along the hedge line in front of him.
What do panthers live off, I can hear you sceptics cry? Well, there has apparently never been so many deer in Britain as there is now. Farming has changed radically in the last 20 years or so - the West Country’s staple of dairy farming is getting harder and harder, and often only possible in mega-sheds. Sheep farming too, is tougher than ever. Fields are increasingly left for silage or left empty altogether, and in that gap, other wildlife, like rabbits, have thrived. Less human activity on land and more small mammals? It’s easy to see what an apex predator could eat.
I remember talking to those involved in one particularly harrowing case. A farmer in north Wiltshire found one morning that one of his cows had clearly given birth overnight, but the calf was nowhere to be found in the field.
He followed a trail of blood across the field, through a hedge and found what looked to have been a stillborn calf on a branch halfway up a tree. The farmer hadn’t believed that big cats were possible in Britain until that moment.
Nearby, around the same time, workers at a livery yard found many of the horses distressed one morning, huddled by the gate of the paddock. Across the way, the circular menage training area had clear, huge cat pawprints right across the sand. No-one there refused to ‘believe’ any more.
These animals are, by their very nature, incredibly shy and wary of humans. They are almost totally nocturnal, they almost always are smart enough to avoid car headlights on a road, and while some drivers report seeing a panther flash across the road in the limit of their headlights on a country road, no-one will ever know how many times a panther has crossed a lane behind a passing car.
If you happen to come near one, it will almost certainly have seen, smelled or heard you coming long before you get there, and will have taken off to hide or avoid you. My friend who had the close encounter said if his dog hadn’t been off the lead, they would have walked straight past the large thicket where it had probably been sleeping, without knowing it was there.
Like many people who’ve seen them, my own sighting was dim and frustrating. Another friend who’d been reporting seeing a large animal disturbing a herd of cows in a field across the river from his house called to tell me it was there again, so I rushed down and out we went. Dusk was falling as we moved through the herd, and the dark shape in the distance always stayed just too far enough ahead for us to get a good look. It was the size of a dog, but longer, and moved slowly and carefully, not trotting or running like a dog. Across two or three fields we followed it until it got too dark to see.
Many who see them never tell a soul, for fear of ridicule. Others tell themselves they must be mistaken, or end up arguing with their mates down the pub, or family and friends, that their eyes must have deceived them.
Those looking at reports and sightings with a semi-scientific eye have concluded that the population is pretty small, but look at countries where pumas, panthers or cougars exist - they have huge territories, and can cover 30 miles in a night. My friend lived in the mountains of Colorado almost all her life, where mountain lions are known to live, and she’s seen one only once, when it disappeared out of her headlights, in all her years of driving the country roads at night.
You can chose to dismiss this if you like. I’ve long gone past the point of thinking everyone needs to believe they exist in this country. Maybe one day someone will catch one somehow, or more likely, get good evidence on their dashcam or doorbell camera. Then again, a huge cat appeared on a petrol station CCTV one night a few years back and the footage formed the basis of many an online article, but still there are those who will scoff until they see one themselves for real, and that’s fine. Facts don’t care about your opinion, and no offence, but neither do I.
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