big cats in the UK – Pain In The Bud

In his memoir, Man-Eaters of Kumaon, legendary tiger hunter (and later staunch conservationist) Jim Corbett described how he and his men arrived to find a ghost town when they tracked a man-eating tiger to a rural village.

Every door was closed and locked, shutters were closed tight, and despite the fact that it was harvest time, not a single person was working the nearby fields.

The people who lived there had good reason to be petrified. The infamous Champawat tigress had killed more than 430 people by that point, including a young woman from the village just a few days earlier. Usually the tigress would vanish from an area after a kill, frustrating locals and hunters by popping up virtually anywhere in a 50-mile radius, but for some reason she stuck around the village and sat on the outskirts at night, keeping the local people awake with her calls.

Corbett’s famed hunt of the “demon of Champawat” happened in 1907, and although it might sound like a problem from the past, it’s current reality for people in parts of India, Nepal and, to a lesser extent, the sparsely populated mountain forests in eastern Russia.

In Garwha and Ranchi, two towns in eastern India about 215km (133 miles) apart, “villagers have stopped using forest routes to reach markets and are reluctant to leave their homes for work,” the Times of India reported on Monday.

That’s because hungry tigers have been on the prowl, demonstrating little fear of people as they help themselves to livestock. Between Jan. 1 and Jan. 6, the tigers killed and ate three cattle and a buffalo.

Siberian tiger — Tigers require large, contiguous tracks of land measuring in the hundreds of square miles. India and Russia have both set aside massive preserves for the apex predators to increase their numbers in the wild. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

So far they’ve eluded camera traps, but forest rangers say they believe there are two tigers because of the distance between Garwha and Ranchi, which is almost three times the typical tiger range.

In places where big cats live in proximity to humans, especially farmers, the government pays compensation to the owners of livestock killed and eaten by the predators.

There’s also a separate, more controversial compensation program for the families of people killed by tigers. Recent court cases in the country have hinged on the cold calculations of attaching monetary value to human life, and whether families are owed compensation if their relatives knowingly entered tiger preserves.

For India, it’s part of a delicate balancing act between conserving the country’s national animal and one of nature’s most beloved species, and avoiding the ire of people who are impacted by their presence. When big cats prey on livestock, if the government does not address the situation, locals will eventually take matters into their own hands and try to kill the apex predators. That usually doesn’t work out well for either side.

On average, about 60 people are killed each year by tigers in India, according to government statistics. There’s been a sharp increase in victims in recent years, with tigers taking 110 human lives in 2022 and 83 in 2023, although it’s not yet clear why.

As for livestock, a 2018 study by wildlife biologists with the Corbett Foundation documented 8,365 reported instances of big cats killing cattle, buffalo and other animals between 2006 and 2015. That works out to about 830 per year, with tigers responsible for 570 livestock kills on average and leopards responsible for the rest.

To reduce the number of inter-species conflicts, the government of India has relocated thousands of families away from the country’s 27 tiger preserves in addition to compensating farmers for their losses.

Tiger sub — A tiger cub on a preserve in India. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

On a tangential note, this is another reason why the persistent claims of big cats stalking the British countryside strain credulity.

To paraphrase wildlife conservationist Egil Droge of the University of Oxford, when big cats live in an area, you know it because the signs are everywhere — massive and unmistakable pug marks (paw prints) on the ground, trees left with deep gauges by males marking their territory, and dung also serving as a territorial marker.

“I’ve worked with large carnivores in Africa since 2007 and it’s obvious if big cats are around. You would regularly come across prints of their paws along roads. The rasping sound of a leopard’s roar can be heard from several kilometres,” Droge wrote in a 2023 post about alleged big cat sightings in the UK.

Last but not least, big cats eat. A lot. A reliable supply of large prey animals is necessary to support even the smallest of breeding populations, and felids of all species are known to go for easy meals — in this case livestock — when the opportunity presents itself.

Still, the idea refuses to die, and there are still regular reports from people who have seen large cats and insist they’re not our domesticated friends.

Leopard in a pub — “So we left the sheep there at the edge of the field and made sure the lady saw us before we buggered off over the fence. Next day, we was in all the papers! A right laugh that was, mate.”

People who really want to believe big cats are running around the British countryside are ecstatic with the news that a DNA sample from a dead sheep reportedly tested positive for panthera DNA.

The DNA sample was swabbed from a freshly-killed sheep carcass “at an undisclosed upland location” in Cumbria, northwest England, a witness told BBC Wildlife. It’s exactly the kind of countryside where people have been reporting big cat sightings for years, although the sightings aren’t confined to that area, with other witnesses claiming they’ve seen large felids as far as the UK’s southern coast.

Sharon Larkin-Snowden, who lives nearby, told a big cat enthusiast podcaster that she disturbed the “big cat” while it was feeding. The startled felid took off and jumped a stone wall, leaving the partially-eaten sheep, Larkin-Snowden said.

“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.”

Jaguar in a pub — “I could really go for a Chinese! Anyone else wanna go for a Chinese?”

A swab was collected — the details are sketchy on who did the collecting and when exactly they submitted the sample — and sent to the University of Warwick’s Robin Allaby, a professor of life sciences.

Allaby, whose specialty is studying the genetics and evolution of domesticated plants, began offering a DNA testing service for the public some 12 years ago in response to the persistent rumors of big cats in the countryside. In the past samples have yielded DNA from foxes and other animals, but Allaby says this one matched the genetic profile of a big cat, although he cannot say which species.

It’s not unusual for a DNA sample to match to a genus, in this case panthera, but not to a specific species if the sample was degraded or only partial.

Rick Minter, who has made a career of tracking alleged big cat sightings across the UK, says he believes the mystery cat is a leopard. Leopards and jaguars are the only two big cats who have true melanistic color morphs — meaning some of them have virtually all-black coats — and Minter says he believes it’s more likely the former.

Neither are native to the UK or Europe: Leopards range from Africa to Asia, while jaguars range from south to Central America, with some populations edging slightly into the US.

puma sits on tree — Britain’s big cat enthusiasts say they believe pumas are among the wild cats living in Credit: Jean Paul Montanaro/Pexels

Why isn’t a DNA match evidence of big cats in the UK?

If the lab results say the sample came from a big cat and that result is consistent with the witness account, what’s the problem?

Chain of custody, for one. We don’t know anything about who took the sample, where it was taken, the time elapsed between the kill and the sample swab, or who may have handled it before it reached Allaby.

In fact, we don’t know if there was a dead sheep to begin with.

If I were a prankster living in the UK, for example, and was friendly with a keeper at a local zoo, I could have the keeper swab an animal, bag it and hand it over to me. There are dozens of conceivable ways a person could obtain a sample even if they don’t know someone who works in a zoo.

The problem is the provenance of the sample and what happens to it between the time it’s collected and ends up in the hands of a scientist like Allaby.

This is why chain of custody is paramount in criminal trials, and why there must be a complete record of who handled samples from collection in the field to the lab. Even in the absence of foul play, an improperly handled sample can be contaminated and render test results meaningless.

It’s not a matter of trust, it’s the simple fact that extraordinary claims require extraordary evidence, as Carl Sagan was fond of saying. Short of capturing one of these animals or getting clear, indisputable footage, any other claimed proof has to be ironclad.

Speaking of footage, that’s another issue. It’s extremely difficult to believe that a breeding population of big cats can exist in the UK countryside for years or even decades without a single definitive photo or video. The UK’s rural areas may not be blanketed by CCTV cameras like London, but they’re not the Amazon either. People live, work and farm in those regions, cameras are more ubiquitous than ever, and farmers take steps to protect their livestock, including installing cameras.

Big cats don’t just feed and vanish into the mist. They mark trees with their claws and urine, they leave distinct pug marks, they leave distinctive bite marks on their prey, and they make noise. To paraphrase one naturalist, when big cats are living nearby, you know it. Even if you don’t see them, signs of their presence are ubiquitous.

To accept the claims of tigers, leopards and pumas gallavanting in the fields around small towns and villages, we’d have to suspend disbelief or conclude that these are some sort of previously unknown ghost cats who can fade in and out of the physical plane.

I’m not a skeptic to be a killjoy. If big cats really were running around the UK, that would be a hell of a story. But we’d still need convincing evidence, and this isn’t it.