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paper interviewed a local police sergeant, who made the cryptic obser-
vation that 'it almost definitely looks like it could be a Beast of
Exmoor'. Only at the bottom of the page did the report reveal that it
was a putrefying seal.
Beast fever has doubtless been heightened by these engaging stories,
but many of those who claim to have seen big cats in Britain also
maintain that they had never heard of them before their own encoun-
ter. There is little question that, while a few are hoaxers, most report
their sightings in good faith. In many cases an animal has been seen
by a group of people, all of whom give similar accounts. So what is
going on? Why, over the past three decades, have reports of big cats in
Britain risen from a few dozen a year to thousands?
There is no discussion of this phenomenon in the scientific litera-
ture: I cannot find a single journal article on big cat sightings. None
of the psychologists I have contacted has been able to direct me to
anyone studying it.
The fact that most of the reported cats are black perhaps gives us a
clue about what might be happening. Black is the only colour that big
cats of any species commonly share with domestic cats. If you glimpse
what you take to be a ginger leopard or a tortoiseshell lion, you are
likely severely to question your perceptions before allowing yourself
to accept what you think you saw. You are likely to be even more reti-
cent when telling other people about your experience. The mismatch
between colour and size interrupts the process of affirmation, in
which your memory reinforces and perhaps exaggerates what you
saw. The interruption is less likely to occur if the cat is black, which
permits at least the possibility that it could be a panther. The moggie
hypothesis might also explain why no one appears to have seen a
leopard in a leopardskin coat.
Judging the size of an animal is difficult. As David Hambling points
out in the magazine
The Skeptic
, people often imagine that the crea-
tures they see are very much bigger than they are.
14
For example, when
police marksmen cornered an escaped caracal in County Tyrone, they
shot it dead in the belief that it was a lion. Lions are twenty times the
weight of caracals. The Kellas Cat of Scotland is a black beast which
really does exist: it is a hybrid of the Scottish wildcat and the feral
domestic cat. It has often been reported as approximating the size of a
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