The Never-spotted Leopard - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 52

Over the past few years the sightings have boomed. In her wonder-
ful topic Mystery Big Cats , Merrily Harpur finds that 'cat-laps', as
she calls them, are occurring at the rate of 2,000-4,000 a year. 5 As I
have discovered while travelling around the country, many others
who have not seen these cats ardently believe that they exist.
Among the Beast-spotters are people even better placed to know
what they are seeing than Michael and the Pembrokeshire farmers:
gamekeepers, park rangers, wildlife experts, a retired zookeeper. As
Merrily Harpur notes, around three-quarters of all the cats reported
are black, and they are commonly described as glossy and muscular.
She also makes the fascinating observation that while the most likely
candidate is a melanistic leopard (the leopard is the species in which
the black form, though rare, occurs most often), she has not been able
to find a single account of an ordinary, spotted leopard seen in the
wild in Britain.
Though the sightings are consistent and the witnesses reliable, the
hard evidence for an extant population of big cats in the UK is no
stronger than the evidence for the Loch Ness monster. In other words,
despite the thousands of days cryptozoologists have spent hunting the
Beast, despite the concentrated efforts of the police, the Royal Marines
and government scientists, there is none.
Though some species of large cat are among the shyest and most
cunning of all wild animals, finding evidence that they exist is not dif-
ficult, for those who know what they are doing. They are creatures of
regular habits. They have territories, dens in which cubs are raised,
spraying points and scratching posts. They scatter prints, spraints and
hairs wherever they go: the first are immediately recognizable, the
provenance of the second and third can be confirmed by DNA
testing.
Even those which are seldom seen leave so much evidence that they
can be closely studied. I once spent a few days with some biologists in
a forest reserve in the Amazon. At night we would hear the jaguars
mewing; but I was told by the team leader that, though they might be
watching us, we would never see them. One day I wandered down to
the stream a few yards from the camp to swim. I spent twenty minutes
in the water, then walked back along the sandy path. In my footprints
were the pugmarks of a jaguar.