The Never-spotted Leopard - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 58

leopard. In fact the biggest specimen ever killed or captured was
forty-three inches from nose to tail, which is smaller than the largest
wildcats. It may be particularly hard to judge the size of a black
animal.
In his topic Paranormality , the psychologist Professor Richard
Wiseman tells us:
Many people think that human observation and memory work like a
video recorder or film camera. Nothing could be further from the
truth . . . At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the
processing power to look at a very small part of your surround-
ings . . . to help ensure that precious time and energy aren't wasted on
trivial details, your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the
most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of
its attention on these elements. 15
The brain, he says, scans the scene like a torch searching a darkened
room. It fills in the gaps, to construct what appears to be a complete
image from partial information.
This image can then become lodged in our memories, and we treat it
as if it were as concrete and definitive as a photograph in an album. If
we are focused on a cat and not on its surroundings, it could be that the
process of singling out the beast magnifies it and shrinks the setting.
I wonder, too, whether there might be a kind of template in our
minds in the form of a big cat. As these were once our ancestors' fore-
most predators,* we have a powerful evolutionary interest in
recognizing them before the conscious mind can process and interpret
the image. It could be possible that anything which vaguely fits the
template triggers the big cat alarm: we lose little by seeing cats which
do not exist, but lose a lot by failing to see those which do.
But none of this explains why big cat sightings appear to have
become much more common in recent years. The phenomenon is not
* Finding myself in South Africa soon after reading Bruce Chatwin's famous account,
I asked a curator at the Transvaal Museum to show me the skulls of Dinofelis , the
false sabretooth cat, and those of the hominids on which it is believed to have preyed,
punctured, just above the spinal column, by its massive canines. They were just as
Chatwin described them in The Songlines .