The DNA of a big cat in the Panthera genus – probably a leopard – has been identified from a swab taken from a dead sheep in the Lake District.
This is the first time that big cat DNA has been found on a carcass in the UK. The analysis was carried out at a laboratory at the University of Warwick run by Prof Robin Allaby.
Allaby told BBC Wildlife that it was very hard to lift DNA from swabs taken from carcasses but there was no doubt in this case. “It makes me a convert [to the existence of non-native big cats in the UK],” Allaby said. “Until now, I have remained open-minded, I think that’s my job as a scientist.”
Allaby has previously identified a bit of a claw that was sent to him from someone who wished to remain anonymous from the north of England as also belong to a cat in the Panthera genus.
Allaby started up the testing service 12 years ago when a roe deer carcass that had been scavenged was discovered in a small valley near Stroud in Gloucestershire. “All we found on that one was fox [DNA], which are a really underestimated predator,” Allaby said.
In the most recent case, the sheep carcass was discovered by Cumbrian resident Sharon Larkin-Snowden in an undisclosed upland location. Larkin-Snowden told Rick Minter’s Big Cat Conversations podcast that she chanced across the dead sheep one morning in October last year.
Larkin-Snowden said the carcass was fresh and that she had disturbed whatever had been feeding on, which she then saw running towards a stone wall before disappearing over it.
“I assumed at first it was a sheepdog, but then I did a double take and realised it was a black cat,” she said. “It was big – the size of a German shepherd dog.”
Rick Minter, who has received more than 1,000 reports of people’s encounters with big cats, said the animal was most likely to have been a leopard.
Of the five species in the Panthera genus – lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar and snow leopard – the only other cat that has a similar melanistic form is the jaguar, and they don’t appear to be in the British countryside, he added.
This news follows the 2022 discovery of strands of black animal hair on a barbwire fence in Gloucestershire apparently belonging to a big cat
