The Never-spotted Leopard - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 59

confined to Britain, though it appears to be particularly widespread
here; there have also been plenty of unlikely sightings in other parts
of Europe, in Australia and in areas of North America that long ago
lost their cougars and jaguars. Feral domestic cats have lived in the
British countryside for centuries, and there is no reason to suppose,
and no evidence that I have seen, that a higher proportion of them are
now black. It could be, with the decline of gamekeeping, that their
population has risen, but that must be offset against the fact that we
spend less time outdoors; it seems unlikely that this outbreak of cata-
tonia can be explained by a rising number of encounters with
moggies.
Certain paranormal phenomena afflict every society, and these phe-
nomena appear to reflect our desires; desires of which we may not be
fully conscious. In Victorian Britain, large numbers of people believed
that the dead were appearing to them and communicating with them.
They saw ghosts, heard voices and imagined they could exchange
messages with the departed through séances and table-turning. The
Victorians were obsessed by death. Walk around any ancient grave-
yard and you will read the tragic story of that era: children and
spouses snatched away, sometimes, in the epidemics that raged
through the crowded cities, within days of each other. Ours was a
nation in perpetual mourning. The notion that the dead could return
in this life must have been almost as comforting as the belief that we
would be reunited with them in the afterlife. Today reports of contact
with the dead are less prevalent.
As the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union
gripped the world's imagination, sightings of UFOs and aliens, almost
unknown in previous eras, multiplied. This was a period in which we
entertained great hopes for the transformative potential of technol-
ogy, in which large numbers of people fantasized about living on
other planets and travelling across galaxies and through time. It was
also an epoch in which the world was shrinking, and we were becom-
ing aware that the age of terrestrial exploration and encounters with
peoples unknown to us was ending; that planet earth was perhaps a
less exciting and more certain place than it had been hitherto. Aliens
and their craft filled a gap, tantalizing us with the possibility that
encounters with unknown cultures could continue, while promising