Cambridgeshire is the latest county in England to be the subject of big cat speculation following the emergence of a video that is said to show a large black panther or leopard.
The footage was taken from a lay-by just outside the village of Baston, north of Peterborough, by roadworker Jason Dobney last Sunday (10 November). The short film shows a black cat walking along the edge of a field in front of an area of woodland.
“We’d been sitting there for about five minutes, waiting for traffic management to be set up, when I looked out my window and saw it about 100 metres away,” Dobney told BBC Wildlife. “From the distance we were at, I knew it wasn’t a house cat.”
Dobney estimated the size of the cat as around six-foot long. “I’ve never seen anything like that before, and my brain just sort of went, ‘Woah’!”
Is there a big cat loose in Cambridgeshire?
There have been numerous reports of big cats, often dubbed the fen tiger, in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire over a period of 30 years. Footage was taken of an animal the size of a medium-sized dog with sand-coloured fur, dark spots and large pointed ears in a Cambridge park in 2020.
But asked to review a still from the video, Dr Luke Hunter, executive director of the Big Cat Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society (a US conservation NGO) said he was “100 per cent certain it’s a moggie.”
Hunter said it was a common mistake to see animals in a landscape as bigger than they really are. “My first question to believers [in big cats in the UK] is how many have they seen in the wild,” Hunter added. “I’ve had thousands of encounters with many different cat species over 30 years.”
Rick Minter, who hosts the Big Cat Conversations podcast, said: “Having established it’s a cat, the next issues include what is the form, the movement, the scale and could this animal predate an adult deer?”
Minter continued that the form is “possibly a large cat like a black leopard”, but its movement wasn’t as heavy and deliberate as he’d expect from a predator and its coat was not as sleek as many witness descriptions. It was also not possible to see the “characteristic rounded ears [of a leopard] at that distance, but the tail appeared to be proportionately long."
Dobney said he had a long-standing interest in big cats in Britain, having grown up in North Devon where he frequently heard stories about them, but had never seen one before.
Images and video: Jason Dobney
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