The Never-spotted Leopard - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 54

movement the lion had jumped through the back window on to the
passenger seat.' It settled down immediately and the officer, not
unconscious of its breath on the back of his neck, drove it to the
station.
In 1980, following a series of livestock killings, a female puma was
caught in a baited cage trap by a farmer in Easter Ross, in Scotland.
At first it appeared to be a wild and ferocious beast, snarling and spit-
ting at its captors. But the effect was spoilt once the puma had settled
into Kincraig Wildlife Park: Harpur reports that whenever anyone
approached her cage, she would start purring and rubbing against the
bars. It seems that she was one of a pair released in the Highlands in
1979 by a man about to be sent to prison. The other was later found
dead near Inverness.
Since then, though hundreds of such traps have been set, only one
large predator has been caught. A cryptozoologist called Pete Bailey,
who had spent fifteen years hunting the Beast of Exmoor, entered one
of his traps to change the bait and accidentally tripped the mechan-
ism. He was stuck there for two nights, eating the raw meat he had set
for the cat, before he was rescued. 7 We hunt the Beast, but the Beast
is us.
That is about the extent of it: no photos, no captures, no dung, no
corpses (except a couple of skulls, which later turned out to have gone
feral after they had escaped from a leopardskin rug and a wall tro-
phy), not even a certain footprint. The Beasts of Britain have evaded
a ive-week hunt by the Royal Marines, police helicopters and armed
response teams (it beats logging car crime), a succession of big cat
experts and bounty hunters and the mass deployment of the best
tracking, attracting and sensing technologies known to humankind.
These techniques have worked elsewhere; not here.
In 1995 the government sent two investigators to Bodmin Moor in
Cornwall, where the evidence for big cats was said to be strongest.
They spent six months in the field, examining carcasses and foot-
prints, exploring the places where the Beast of Bodmin was spotted
and photographed. There is something of the nineteenth-century royal
commission about this investigation. The report contains photo-
graphs of a strapping fellow with a large moustache and a measuring
pole, demonstrating the heights of the natural features on which the