The Wansdyke & District Forums

right, the big cat. every few years it goes round again, the pewsey panther, the beast of the downs, whatever the paper calls it that week. and every few years some townie sees next doors black tom at a distance and theres a flap. BUT. ive farmed here fifty years, ive seen a lot of cats and a lot of foxes, and ive twice seen something on my own ground that was neither. low, long, dark, moving wrong, too big. once at dusk and once in the headlights. i dont believe in much and i am telling you i do not know what that was, and i had a gun both times and did not raise it, which tells you something about how i felt.

my money is on it being real and boring, by which i mean actual escaped or released big cats, theres been enough of them over the years since the dangerous wild animals act came in, people let them go rather than license them. doesnt have to be supernatural to be a genuine black leopard living quiet on the downs and taking the odd lamb. Bill how big are we talking, labrador size or bigger?

bigger than a lab Pete, lower though, and the tail was the thing, long and thick and carried out behind. no dog and no domestic cat has that tail. im not saying leopard, im not saying anything, im saying i know my own fields and what belongs in them, and that didnt. lambs go now and then in ways a fox doesnt do, dragged not scattered. make of it what you will. im not putting it in the paper, the last bloke who did got laughed at and the cat carried on regardless.

For the record I am a sceptic on the panther but not a scoffer, because the lamb-kill evidence Bill describes is the genuinely interesting bit and not what a fox does. Deer are the better tell: where there are confident big cats you get deer carcasses stripped in a particular way, and we do occasionally get odd deer kills on the downs that I cannot tidily attribute. So I keep an open file. Probably escaped exotics, very few, very shy, very good at not being seen, which is exactly what a big cat is built to be. Not magic. Just better at hiding than we are at looking.

The beeb did something on it a few years back, though. https://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content ... ture.shtml