The Never-spotted Leopard - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 50

leant on each other, dark-cowled, like drunken friars. Beneath them
was an impenetrable thicket of brambles and ferns.
'You wouldn't see him in there, would you?'
'You have no doubt about what it was?'
Michael Disney looked around, at the high bank down which it had
come, the narrow strip of pitted tarmac, the low, twisted woodland,
and shrugged.
'It's not an issue for me. I saw what I saw and that's that. People can
either believe it or not. I'm not trying to convince anyone.'
'You work for the council's public protection division. Has anyone
accused you of drumming up business?'
'No, it's not my remit. I'm in trading standards. In fact it's not really
anyone's remit.' He smiled slightly, as if picturing the job description.
'What would be the reason for me to put myself in a situation where
I could be ridiculed and mocked? I would get nothing from it at all,
except a slight bit of notoriety.'
Michael had been driving down the lane towards the A40, return-
ing from an inspection visit. He had heard the stories, seen pictures in
the local paper of the prints found at Princes Gate, a few miles to the
other side of Haverfordwest, and had not believed a word of it.
'If I'd been dreaming or thinking about them at the time, it might
have been another matter. But it was the last thing on my mind. I was
just driving along - and one crosses the road. He was probably about
three feet high and six feet long. I would say bigger than a medium-sized
dog, but definitely not a dog. He was powerful-looking, with a black,
glossy, shiny coat, incredibly muscular, like a horse's shoulders. But it
was the head that was really strange-looking. I've never seen a head
like that, not even in a zoo.'
Michael Disney, former policeman, county council officer, had, to
his own astonishment, become one of roughly 2,000 people who see
a big cat in the wild in Britain every year.
By the time Michael saw the beast now known as the Pembrokeshire
Panther, there had, according to Wales on Sunday , been ten 'confirmed
sightings'. 1 Some of those who claimed to have seen it were farmers or
farmworkers, familiar with the county's less exotic wildlife. Among
them were the farmer and - independently - his wife, whose land bor-
dered the lane in which we stood. All described it, as Michael had done,