The Never-spotted Leopard - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 55

creatures were photographed. 8 The text reads in places like the final
chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles . It is thorough, exhaustive
and devastating to those who argued that, while other reputed big
cats might not exist, the Beast of Bodmin was real.
They examined the famous video sequence, broadcast widely on
television, which shows a cat leaping cleanly over a drystone wall. It
looks impressive, until you see the man from the ministry standing
beside the wall with his pole, and realize that the barrier is knee-high.
A monstrous cat sitting on a gatepost shrinks, when the pole arrives,
from a yard at the shoulder to a foot. In one case, where the Beast was
filmed crossing a field, and there were no useful landmarks against
which to compare it, the investigators brought a black domestic cat to
the scene, set it down in the same spot and photographed it from
where the video had been taken. The moggie looks slightly bigger
than the monster. (Undeterred, the supporters of the Beast of Bodmin
now insist that the original pictures show baby big cats, whose par-
ents are mysteriously absent from the scene. Stills from these videos
continue to be used as evidence that big cats roam Britain.)
The investigators compared a chilling nocturnal close-up of the
Beast with a picture of a real black leopard, and spotted an obvious
but hitherto unnoticed problem. The panther in the cage, like all big
cats, has round pupils, while the creature in the photograph has verti-
cal slits, a feature confined to smaller species, such as the domestic cat.
They examined the three plaster casts of footprints taken from the
moor. Two were made by a domestic cat, one by a dog. They attended
the gruesome corpses of sheep that local people insisted had been
ripped apart by the Beast. That they had been ripped apart was indis-
putable, but the villains were crows, badgers, foxes or dogs (whose
footprints were distributed liberally around some carcasses), and in
most cases they had struck after the sheep had died of other causes.
While the scientists conceded that it was impossible to prove that a big
cat did not exist, they found that there was no hard evidence to sup-
port the story. Both the official body Natural England and the Welsh
government's Big Cat Sighting Unit, investigating sightings across Brit-
ain, confirmed to me that they have come to the same conclusion.
I would go a step further: if a breeding population of these animals
existed, hard evidence would be abundant and commonplace. Its