All Episodes
Previous Next
June 6, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:48
Edition 460 - Rick Minter

Big cat expert Rick Minter on the UK's growing "big cat" population - where they are and how they got here...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, another boiling hot day here in London Town as I record this.
May was warm or hot sometimes, and it looks like June, which we are now into.
Could be for part of it at least the same.
Who knows what the temperature is going to be like here by the time we get into July, August.
I don't even want to think about it.
Although, you know, it's better than winter.
Lockdown, of course, continues here in the UK.
For me, this is more than nine weeks of doing everything that I do in my own little flat, my own apartment, and not really seeing anybody beyond the people on the checkout at the local supermarket.
It's been the strangest of existences because I've spoken to people all over the world and I've done a radio show, but I haven't really left my home apart from a daily cycle in two and a half months.
It's astonishing.
And look, you know, I've got it comparatively easy, so I have no cause for complaint.
But some people have found it enormously difficult.
And, you know, I've had my challenges at times, but mostly I've got through.
I hope that you're okay.
And thank you for sending me your stories of what's going on with you in lockdown.
You can always do that.
And thank you very much for the nice, kind things that you've said about this show and, you know, the way that you use it and what it means to you.
And my website is theunexplained.tv.
You can send me a message by clicking on the message link there.
And it can be about guest suggestions or anything, really, how you're getting on with lockdown.
You know, I'd love to hear from you.
If you'd like to leave a donation for the podcast, then you can do that at the website theunexplained.tv and thank you if you have recently very much.
And thank you to my webmaster, Adam, for his continuing hard work on all of this.
Just before we get to the guest on this edition, which is a podcast conversation, so we'll have more time for it to expand and go wherever it wants to go, we're going to be speaking with Rick Minter from Big Cat Conversations about the UK phenomenon of big cats in the wild in the UK.
How did they get there?
And if they've been there for decades and decades, you know, how do they survive and how do they coexist with us?
And how are they so elusive?
Good questions and we'll be asking them.
But first, as they say, some shout-outs just to say hello to Leon, Susan, Sean in Donegal, Janet, not very far from Sydney and not far from the ocean.
I'm very jealous, Janet.
Nice to hear from you.
And Chris in Canada.
Hope to tell your Bigfoot tales here soon, Chris.
Thank you for that.
And also Eileen in, actually, where is Eileen?
Eileen is in Memphis, Tennessee, of course, Elvis Country.
Eileen sent me a great story about a bizarre coincidence or something more.
I'll try and paraphrase it, but basically Eileen's story is that she went somewhere, she had the keys for her car on a crystal keyring, that's a keyring with a crystal bit on it, and lost those almost like down a drain or down a, you know, a little place, you know, around the floor, essentially, and couldn't retrieve those.
Now, this was at a car park, I believe, and she had to wait until the next day to get the keys back when they were fished out of wherever they were at.
Now, by that time, the crystal had disappeared, so she decided to give up on the crystal.
But that's where it gets interesting.
She thought she'd lost the crystal forever.
But, and I'm quoting now from the email, a few months later, I'm changing the tags on my car, which is what they do in the US.
And I lift up the back hatch of the car.
I reach in to get something, and sitting right on the ledge of my back hatch is the crystal.
And Eileen says there's no way that I would have been able to sit there without being jostled to the floor.
I was astounded, and we went over every possible scenario, but we could never come up with one that made sense.
Even now, every once in a while, I will ask her about it.
That's Richie.
That is my weird story.
It is a weird story.
How can something disappear and you give up on it?
And then it turns up on the back ledge of your hatch.
I don't know if you've got a suggestion.
But life is full of those things, isn't it?
So thank you, Eileen, for that story.
Great story, as they say.
All right, let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
In the United Kingdom, we're talking Big Cats with Rick Minter from Big Cat Conversations.
Now, I've spoken with Rick many times recently on the news segment of my radio show.
Time for a podcast, I thought.
Rick Minter, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
A pleasure.
Now, Rick, you and I have spoken, of course, many times on air on the radio.
Usually you come on on a Sunday night to talk about some big cat sighting that's happened in some far-flung corner of the UK or maybe some urban area these days.
And, you know, we both thought that it would be a good idea to get you on the podcast and maybe to introduce you to an international audience, which is thankfully what I have these days.
So if that works for you, that's the plan.
Does that work for you?
Splendid.
Yeah, very grateful for the opportunity.
All right.
Now, you are the man behind Big Cat Conversations.
And that is kind of a blog and a podcast about big cats, isn't it?
Mainly a podcast, really.
There's a backup website for reference material that we feature and refer to during the conversations on the podcast.
Right.
And I would have thought before last year, when I seriously started to get interested in the big cat side of things, I thought big cats were just an occasional story for the unexplained, not something that was more regular than that.
I would never have thought somebody doing a podcast and having an interest in big cats would find enough to occupy their time.
But especially at the moment, you're rushed off your feet with it all, aren't you?
It goes in waves, actually.
Yes, it has got busy recently.
And I think one of those reasons is that some reports can prompt others because they're in the media, they're in the local papers.
And if you leave a website or a phone number or an email, you can get follow-ups.
I think people just feel more confident to feel that they'll chirp up about their sighting, which they kept quiet about.
In fact, I still feel that most people never report their encounter to anybody.
I think we only get the tip of the iceberg because it's remarkable and consistent How shy and reticent and cautious people are.
But in terms of the timings, also, we're normally very busy in winter from, say, February to it, finishes in February, starting November, the four sort of colder months.
So, what's that telling us?
Every year, it didn't happen this past year because it was relentlessly wet, and I think people weren't out being able to see cats, and maybe the cats skulked undercover more.
But every winter, without fail, it gets busier, and maybe that's about seeing the landscape more easily because the vegetation's down.
But maybe the cats can't laze around so much because it's too cold, and for body temperature regulation, they're more active.
Well, that's a thought, but of course, this year, certainly the tabloid newspapers in the UK carried quite a few stories in the winter.
There's been a steady stream of these stories, and it's heated up a little recently, and we will discuss that.
I think what we have to do is get our terminology right, especially for people who are new to you and what you do.
Big cat, it seems to me, is one of those terms like bigfoot.
It's a very general term, and people mean different things by it.
So in the context in which you discuss it, and we talk about it in the United Kingdom, what is a big cat?
I think a good way to think about it is something that's become feral in the British landscape that is capable of predating deer.
It's big enough to stalk and ambush and take down a deer.
Now, the literal sense, the scientific sense of big cat is the panthera genus rather than the felus genus of cats.
And they're the panthera ones are the bigger ones that can actually roar.
Most of them can roar, and they can all take down big prey.
But I think, to keep it simple, can it predate deer?
So sometimes when there's a bit of an iffy photo in the papers and you think, is that just a feral cat or a farm cat and somebody's missited it or somebody's being a bit devious to try and get some money from the tabloids?
I always think, although we can't really tell the scale until a proper reference scaling exercise was done, is my gut instinct saying it could predate a deer or not?
And so that's a good yardstick.
Are they deer killers, basically?
Okay.
And in general terms, the ones that you would properly put into the classification, do they have anything in common with the big cats that I've seen regularly in South Africa, for example?
I mean, look, I've been to many of the parks there, and you know that you can study them up close and very personal.
You have to be careful because you don't have the kind of safeguards that you would get in some kind of zoo here in the United Kingdom.
And I've watched them behave and I've compared and contrasted their behavior with domestic cats.
And there are similarities and there are many big differences.
Are there similarities between what people report in the United Kingdom as big cats and those cats?
Yeah, the key candidate is the leopard.
And if you start reading about the leopard and if you go on safari to India or Sri Lanka or Africa, you will find that you're not guaranteed to see a leopard.
You've probably found that yourself, Howard.
Amongst the sort of big five, the leopard is one of the big five in South Africa, say on safaris, they don't guarantee you'll see them.
It's deeply elusive.
And I think probably only on the I don't go on safaris and that kind of thing.
I just visit the parks and talk to some of the experts.
But I think I've seen one of those once.
And of course, the lions you see lying around in the sun all the time.
Yes, and they're the only species really of the 39, depending how you classify wild cats, there are 39 or 40.
And they're all solitary, really.
The male will encompass several females and have a bigger territory than several females, apart from the lions that work in prides.
So the lions will be, although they're stealthy really as well, you can see them because they're out in bigger groups.
But the leopards work as ambush predators.
So they have to really stalk their prey, sneak up pretty close within, say, 20 meters and have this explosive rush to grapple down their prey and then go for the windpipe or a muzzle hold and suffocate the prey and then shear into it and eat it.
But what a lot of people don't realize about the leopard is that it comes in black as well.
And where you get black leopards mainly in big numbers is in the Malay Peninsula, north of Singapore and inside from Kuala Lumpur, and in Java, the middle part of Indonesia.
Those are big strongholds of black leopards.
Unfortunately, they are being poached, so the numbers are in decline, just a few hundred left.
And of course, that is Bargera, as we know in the jungle book, also called Black Panther.
Biologically, there's no such thing as panther.
Black Panther is either a Jaguar in a black or melanistic form is the other term.
And melanism is from a mutation from recessive genes for a leopard and dominant genes from Jaguar.
But it's reckoned that the majority of the larger black cats seen in Britain are melanistic black leopards.
So you won't see a spotted one because two parents that are black will breed on exclusively black offspring for leopards.
For Jaguar, if we had jaguars here, I think we'd know it because they're slightly bigger and slightly more thick set and strong.
They would probably sometimes predate horses and cattle.
The big toms would be big enough to do that sometimes.
But you'd also get a few spotted ones because black jaguars breed on sometimes about 25% or so spotted jaguar.
So think about the black leopard, black panther as the main candidate in Britain as our big cat.
But also a very similar size cat and its nature and behavior is the American mountain lion.
And that can also predate deer, very similar profile and behavior to a black leopard, that long, thick tail.
And most witnesses say they think they're seeing labradors.
They think they're seeing a golden labrador first if they see a mountain lion type cat or a black labrador if they're seeing a black leopard.
But then they say, well, I then noticed the thick, long tail.
It wasn't wearing a collar.
It had a very long, stretched body.
It was lower to the ground.
So those are two main big cats That account for the majority of the reports here.
Now, before we, it's good to get the terminology correct, which you've done brilliantly there.
Thank you.
You've explained a lot that I never knew.
So, thank you for that.
We do have to say one important thing I think, and I learned this in Africa about big cats.
I used to think, like most people think, aggressive, big teeth, keep away from them, they've got a bit of a temper, and some of them may be very nasty.
Now, that's not entirely the case.
You know, they're part of the food chain, they're part of nature, but also they're delicate.
If you affect their habitat, then you're going to affect them materially.
But also, one thing I did learn when I went to look at the little ones, and I'm thinking about the lions that I saw, and I was allowed to see the babies at one point.
But it is very easy to infect them.
You think of them being rough, tough, and with massive resistance, but in fact, we are a threat to them as human beings, aren't we?
Yes, and that is why they want to keep away from us.
Although we would be easy prey, because we're slow and we're soft-skinned.
I think they sort of see us as an awkward, troublesome, upright ape that's noisy and bumbling.
And so they do keep away, and they haven't really evolved to see us as prey and treat us as prey.
And it's always interesting when you're dealing with the media and tabloids because they sort of want to go for this headline, beast on the loose.
And the headline, shy predator, keeping quiet and treating humans with respect and keeping away from us, doesn't really, can't be simplified and isn't really the subtle message that newspapers want.
So Beast on the Loose is sort of what you see as a headline, but of course it's really unrepresentative.
And what's interesting is that many of the witnesses in Britain say how arrogant the cat is when they've realised it's a cat and it disappears and melts away.
It melts away on its own terms, in its own time.
I mean, it does melt away pretty quickly, but they've got this sort of grace and arrogance of doing it.
They only flee away if they're cornered and they feel desperate, but otherwise they take their time and they just saunter and just disappear.
But the likelihood is that they are not.
If you encounter one of these things and you identify it correctly as being a, quote, big cat, the chances are it's not going to go for you.
It's probably going to seek cover.
It does not want a confrontation with you.
And that's why we don't read in the newspapers about people being willy-nilly attacked by these things, because that's not their style.
Correct.
I think there are some exceptions, though.
And the problem is, if I start talking about those, and we can do if you want, they are unrepresentative.
So I would say about every 18 months, I will get a report from somebody who's seen one eyeing up their dog, for example, or and their dog was very nervous and worried, and they thought, what's going on?
And they suddenly look into the edge of the forest ride and see a big cat eyeing up their dog and considering what to do.
And people are genuinely, genuinely scared in those kinds of situations.
And they do want somebody to talk it through.
And you almost feel like people need that sort of counseling for a bit to get over the emotional impact of it.
Occasionally people are traumatized.
And I think sometimes women that have been followed and I've asked them, did you smell a perfume?
And largely the answer is yes.
And it is that smell.
It could be that it's the musk that's like a deer to the cat.
So there are a few exceptions, Howard, where you can get confrontations.
And I think it could only get awkward if somebody reacted the wrong way.
In a confrontation, I think you've got to keep composed and back off and treat the cat with respect and certainly not get freaked out and suggest that you could be prey and go all meek.
And there's a sort of view that if you act like prey, you might get treated like prey because sometimes the cat is, if it then takes an interest, you, particularly if you're small, a child or something, it may feel, well, there's no injury risk here.
I may as well follow through.
But just to quickly talk about a couple of incidents of encounters with children, I remember that one little girl, I think she's about five years old, she was leading a group of four children up the edge of a hill, Cotswold's on the side, by the side of Cheltenham, edge of Cheltenham.
And it was a half-term holiday.
They're walking the dogs up there.
And she saw a deer and she sort of beckoned the others.
And the teenagers who reported it, relayed the story, said she ran ahead to sort of get closer to the deer, not realizing at that age that she would disturb it and it would run off.
And that's actually what happened.
But they said that a black panther ran out at her and charged at her and got within about five meters from her and roared at her.
And they were all absolutely terrified and ran home.
And the mother, phoning my friend Frank Tunbridge, who is one of the main recorders in Gloucestershire, said, I don't know if they're telling the truth, but all I can say is they're white as a ghost.
They're covered in bramble scratches.
They have fled home in a panic.
And this is their story.
Now, what she described, what those teenagers behind her with her described was a leopard's charge.
That was presumably a black leopard that was stalking, eyeing up a deer that she disturbed.
And so it was pumped up and ready to go for its prey.
And very fortunately, although she was sort of in the way, it withdrew.
And I think, of course, that is such a rare atypical example, but it's rather sort of chilling to consider it, isn't it?
And if you're in that situation, I want to wind back to the history of these encounters, which we should probably have done earlier, but this is so fascinating.
If you're ever in that situation...
But I always have this rule that I never stare them out.
I never look directly into their eyes for any great length of time because I always learned, and maybe this is wrong, that to do that is a threat to an animal.
All these years have I been right about that?
Well, I think it's a good way of thinking.
I feel if the chances of getting into a confrontation with one of our larger wildcats in Britain are negligible.
But if it did happen, I think to think about how you would react if it was a potentially aggressive dog, a feisty dog, is good thinking.
Sort of to keep your composure, to look towards it generally, but not to fix stares and not to aggravate it with your body language.
But to suggest, I think the bottom line is also to let it know that if it did want to take an interest in you, you would injure it.
It does not want to get injured.
If it knows you're going to harm it, it will withdraw, I think.
Sometimes reading about American mountain lions getting interested in people, they will surround them and encircle them.
And they are, it seems that they are, when people have survived this to write it up and report it, which is very useful, people have suggested that that cat was looking for a weakness in them, looking for them to submit and to suggest it was prey.
And so don't submit and keep your confidence and back off, I think, at the rules.
Somebody once told me, and please don't take my advice on this one, but I was considering visiting a place in the world that is noted for, if you go in the wrong places, a certain amount of gang culture and roughness.
And somebody told me that the way to survive is to look like, it's acting really, to look like you're the one with the concealed weapon.
In a way, that's the way to survive if you find yourself encountering a big cat.
You've got to look as if you have the capacity to take them on.
Yes.
Yeah, sure.
Even though you know and I know, they would win.
Exactly.
Absolutely.
Or they're going to get injured.
They cannot risk getting injured.
In a way that, you know, they don't have the support systems, of course, they don't, that we have.
Okay, I want to wind back now to the history of this, because when I was a kid, and maybe when you were a kid too, reports of big cat sightings in the wild in the UK were regarded in the same way as reports of headless monks walking on the ramparts of British castles.
They were just seen as bizarre and highly improbable.
You know, just as improbable as alien spacecraft lands in the centre of Chester.
They were regarded in the same way.
They're not anymore, we have to say, because of the prevalence of reports.
But let's just chart the history of these reports in the UK.
Yeah, well, it's reckoned by most people who look at the subject that it all started in the 1970s, 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act, which basically meant you had to be licensed.
If you wanted to keep something like a black leopard or an American mountain lion or any other registered dangerous animal, you could no longer keep it sort of loose in your flat on your apartment or loose or tethered in your garden.
You would have to put it in proper protective enclosure situation suited for that particular animal.
So cats would have to be in proper secure compounds in your garden or in your property.
And you would have to pay an annual fee and you would have to be inspected by the council who would subcontract that to a vet or a similar person.
And it was much, much more onerous and much more expensive.
So at that time, it is known that many, many owners of these animals did consult zoos and wildlife parks and other people to see if they could change the ownership and other people would take them on.
So it's reckoned and it's known from admissions that there were releases, there was a wave of releases of these animals as trophy pets in that time.
But I would say before that, it's very likely that wartime was an earlier episode of releases, because there were collections of these in earlier times and they are strict meat eaters.
They are what's called obligate carnivores.
They can't eat any vegetables.
You can't sort of give them mix in sort of peas and vegetables and whatever with their meat and rations.
It's strict meat rations and that's it.
So wartime would have been a challenge to keep your collection of big cats.
So I think some were let out in wartime.
The other reasons for releases are thought to be that people have had them as guarding animals, the next step up from a dog, of course.
And people have had sort of metal bashing companies.
So sometimes people have, local people have said, yeah, the local metal processing, metal bashing person had one.
And of course, some of those people, if it was quite informal, might be quite lawless themselves.
And I think also another reason would be military mascots.
And that's thought to be the case in both Australia, because Australia has the same factors.
It has ongoing reports of black panther, black leopard type animals, and the American mountain lion, the Sandy Brown puma cat as well.
So that would have been military mascots.
American air bases having pumas, the mountain lion, probably as young ones and then growing up when they were here and then released when they were here.
So all of that means there were different times of releases and that would all help the gene pool over time.
And I think the fact that these two types of cats, the mountain lion and the black leopard, are such generalists, they can survive so well.
They've got no special characteristics and they can survive different temperatures and different environments.
They would basically like it here.
They would have a ball here, I think, with the abundant food.
So once they're out, I think they can meet each other and breed.
And it seems that's what's happened.
Right.
You said meet each other.
Forgive me for my basic lack of knowledge on genetics here.
There is no truth in rumors that they can breed with domestic cats?
Not at that scale, no.
I think some of the smaller cats, like a jungle cat, 20 odd years ago, there were what's called a jungle cat, Felus Chaus, through parts of Asia.
That would have been used for design of breeding, the chousey, a bit like the serval cat today is now used to breed with domestic cats to produce the savannah cat, which you're seeing now in the newspapers as sometimes being out.
And people are a bit freaked out seeing this bit larger than usual, exotic-looking cat in a park or a garden.
Often mistaken for a big cat.
Yes, that's right.
And they can be quite feisty.
The more wild ones, the earlier generation ones, can be quite feisty.
The same would have happened 20-odd years ago with the jungle cat and what it produced, the Chalcy.
Now, if those were out breeding with our farm cats and feral cats, they might have produced a fox-sized cat, which probably can't predate a deer, but could be miss-sighted as a larger panther, perhaps.
So I think that there is a bit of a gradation, but I think the black leopards are mainly pure black leopards.
There may be some quirky ones.
Occasionally, you get a very credible sighting and a couple of bits of footage, actually, of large black leopard-sized cats, which don't appear to be black leopards because they've got pointed ears.
There's something slightly, you know, most of the sort of the Anuraki people like me think, hmm, I'm not sure that is a black leopard, actually, even though it looks like a large black cat.
So maybe something else there, but I think it's largely American mountain lion and black leopards that are becoming naturalized.
You know, they're naturalizing in Britain, albeit in very low numbers.
They are incredible at survival, then.
They are incredibly savvy, if I may use that term for them.
Because if what you're saying is true, for all of these decades, they've been maintaining the gene pool, building it up, strengthening it.
And they've been doing all of this by stealth.
Because routinely, on an average day, they are not seen.
So they've been doing this.
I mentioned Bigfoot at the beginning of all of this, but they have been doing this in almost the stealth that if you believe Bigfoot is a thing, that Bigfoot and its variants around the world have been breeding over perhaps a potentially longer period.
The thought that they've been around for many, many years in the United Kingdom, but in the shadows, in the most, you know, in the main, is an astonishing thought.
And it's a bit of a tribute to them that they've been able to do that, that they have perceived that it's better to keep away from man if you want to thrive and survive.
You know, they haven't done what, for example, foxes have done.
And foxes have become urban.
You know, we have foxes.
I see foxes in central London now.
They're everywhere.
But the big cats haven't done that.
No, I think there's several reasons there.
I think many mammals actually are much more stealthy and furtive than we imagine.
And it's a bit like the otter.
You know, as a citizen in Britain, unless we're a fisherman, we wouldn't really expect to see an otter in our lifetime, would we?
Yet there are thousands of otters.
And it's great that they've made in the last sort of 15 years or so, they've made a great recovery across the landscape.
And even deer can be difficult to see, to be honest.
A lot of these mammals, they have to be stealthy to survive.
But the alpha predator, the apex predator that's an ambush predator, has to be even more stealthy.
The exception back in Africa where you go is the cheetah.
And that's not an ambush predator.
That's a running cat.
So if we had cheetahs, we would see them because they would run in open ground to follow their prey and trip it up.
So people will see cheetahs if they go on safari in Africa.
It's an easier cat to see.
But these cats are not seen much by native people in their native land.
So when I go, as I do fairly regularly over to the western states of America to talk to people and study pumas, when I meet citizens of, say, Colorado, and there's estimated, say, 3,000 mountain lions in Colorado, well, most people don't see them and won't expect to see them.
And if they have seen them, it's a big event or one of their family members have.
It's a big event in their life.
So that they're not, all of their culture and folklore is things like, like the American Indians, the native people say the mountain lion wears soft moccasins.
In India, the black leopard, the leopards are called the invisible one or the ghost cat.
So all of that folklore reinforces how stealthy and furtive these animals are.
And if you're not even looking for them anyway, you're not even hardly aware that they're around in the British landscape, and there's only two or three hundred of them anyway, you're hardly going to notice them anyway.
So we can go on to why I can justify those numbers in a minute if you want.
Yes, I would like that very much.
So the story of them here in the UK then, over the period that they have developed as a population, and I'll ask you at some point to estimate at the moment the size of that population, is that they're built to survive and they're built to thrive.
So they're going to do that.
And they have been released.
It's not that they've arrived here in the cargo holds of ships like tarantulas in bananas.
That's not how they got here.
They have been released from either people who've had them for, as you say, guarding a business or maybe they've been in a private collection or maybe somebody's had a cat at home and they've realized, you know, that is all going to be regulated and they won't be able to cope with the regulation.
So they've just released it into the wild and let it fend for itself, which it's done en masse.
Yes, because there was enough of a founder population and there's been enough of subsequent waves of releases and they can communicate well enough and a male will spend his lifetime looking for estrous females and they will communicate by scent marking and calling and scratching trees and they can sort of meet each other and two or three hundred in the British landscape isn't much to notice really but
they are the deer killers and they don't need to rely on sheep.
A lot of people think, well, if there were big cats here, we'd have mass sheep slaughter.
Well occasionally you get a farmer who does notice that their sheep have been taken in unusual circumstances.
But I think they can work undercover very well.
I think I mentioned when I was on your show about three weeks ago the great case of the cat that has the hillside area of Hollywood, in that area of Los Angeles.
And he's called P22.
His code name is Puma22.
He's radio-collared, so they know where he goes.
They can follow his movements and look at the radio-collared Telemetry data.
And his territory is adjacent to a quarter of a million people, yet he's hardly ever seen and he hardly ever causes any hassle in that situation.
And he's great for the educational value of mountain lions in America.
So there's lots of articles being written on him.
Occasionally, people know where to put out the camera traps, the trail cameras, to photograph him, and they bait them.
So there's even one lovely one with him with a Hollywood sign behind him.
So he's an example of a sort of semi-urban cat that has got a territory adjacent to an urban area and lives around people without them knowing.
So the rule for him is just like the rule for human beings.
You know, if you can survive in Hollywood, kid, you can survive anywhere.
That sounds like a trivial point, but that applies to the population of these things here.
And you said you think maybe 300.
Well, yeah, it sounds rather unscientific to guess.
And I don't like, I used to shy away from stating numbers, but the way I would estimate it is that the reports suggest that they are not inbred.
Now, you would expect if we had a sort of small rump of a population that were from zoo stock, there'd be quite a motley collection, and there'll be deformities and old crunky ones and whatever.
But actually, the majority of the reports, people are suggesting very confident, very stealthy, very wild cats that know their place and seem to have sort of grown up in the area.
So there have to be, for them not to be interbred, there have to be, I mean, obviously there have to be enough mates out there.
Exactly.
So it looks like looking at the sort of genetic sort of reference material on all of this and speaking to people who have expertise in that.
And if you wanted to start up, if you were reintroducing links to Britain and wanted to start up a population, you'd sort of get you'd hope to get to 200 and then you think, right, I think they can take off now.
Below 200, you think, hmm, we still haven't sorted it out.
The genetic breadth and health of it isn't quite there.
So once you get to 200 or 300, you think, yeah, the inbreeding issue is probably we've overcome that problem.
So I think the lack of inbred sightings of these cats suggests 200 or 300 at least.
Well, you know, that is a substantial number.
And in terms of where they might be spread, where they are most likely to thrive, is it the places we would assume they would be?
I mean, I would think if I was guessing, and if I read the tabloid newspapers, I would think, well, they're going to be in Devon and Cornwall, Bogman Moore, places like that.
They're going to be in rural Gloucestershire, which is your Bailiwick.
They're going to be maybe out towards Cambridgeshire and East Anglia.
They're going to be in Yorkshire, and they're going to be in Scotland, in the Highlands.
Would those be the sorts of places where they might be?
Yes, but I think it's very wide distribution seems to be the answer.
And I think there are several factors here.
I think one of the key factors is they would follow deer.
Deer would be the mainstay of their diet, but they would also eat rabbits and pheasants and pigeons, but also sheep if they need to transfer to something in cold times when they can't get deer easily.
So I think sheep are second preference or whatever.
So places where there's good deer, but the deer population is widely spread in Britain.
There's only a few parts of Wales that don't have deer, and there's deer, several different species of deer in abundance.
So that's not much of an issue.
Even in, say, the croplands of the flatter country in the east, East Anglia and Lincolnshire and Norfolk, they will get sort of rabbits and roats, rats and mice even.
They'll be constantly snacking on those.
So you can live undercover in cropland.
And we do get sightings more, say, in September when the crops are cut.
So I think it can be very wide, the distribution.
I think I've mentioned before on your show also, there's this thing called the recorder effect.
So are we talking about the physical distribution of the cats themselves?
Or are we talking about where there are trusted people who take the data, who take the information, like myself and Frank Tubbridge in Gloucestershire and our counterparts elsewhere?
And incidentally, wherever we do, wherever there are people like us, we always find that it's three quarters or so of the reports are the big black one, the black leopard candidate, and about a quarter are the mountain lion, puma type, the sandy grey one.
And then about 5% are links.
So you do get the links as well as the three key ones that are reported.
But it's so difficult to know whether these potential more popular locations, which are largely as you just listed them, Howard, is that because that's where there are slightly more of these cats?
Or is it because there's a history of the newspapers and the media taking reports there and trusted people taking reports?
But of course, in the last five years, the new thing on the scene is Facebook groups.
Now, there are many, many Facebook groups in Britain, large and small, with big cat reports discussing it.
And I would say 90% of the discussion on the Facebook groups is noise, is irrelevant sort of opinion swapping or whatever.
But 10% of it is very good with some very wise and informed comments.
So they are worth, if you're interested in the subject, it's worth looking at your local Facebook group or looking at one of the national ones.
So I think we're still learning, but I think wherever you scratch the surface, you've got a chance of finding that there may be some credible reports in your area.
And they do appear, because we've discussed this on the air as recently as last night, but they do appear in places where you might expect to find them.
You know that I have a sister who lives in Worcestershire, and my favourite way back to London is not… It drives me mad.
I want to see some countryside.
I want to enjoy the niceties of this country when we're allowed to see them.
So I will go from Malvern, and I will go on the M5 motorway heading south, and you'll see the sign.
You know, you see Staverton Airfield Airport and a turn off to the left there will take you up.
It's Birglip Hill, isn't it?
Correct.
And that's quite steep.
It winds up and that literally marks the frontier of where Effectively, the Midlands and Gloucestershire ends, and where the Cotswolds and your gateway to Oxfordshire and London begins.
But you have to go over this wild and fairly lonely hill and the area around it.
Now, I've always thought, I bet there are creatures hiding in there.
And I asked you about it on the radio, and you said, indeed, it is believed there are.
Yeah, and in fact, I think I sent you a report from an old report.
Well, a guy who, it was a fresh report, but from dating from many years back, a guy was a child.
I think it was a teenager.
And he was in a traffic queue in the back seat and going up Birdlip Hill in the past.
And he looked out and he saw one of these mountain lion cats in the edge of the woodland halfway up.
And he said to his dad driving, Dad, I can see a lion.
And his dad said, don't be stupid.
We don't have lions in this country.
And years later, he looked it up and thought, oh, probably that was the mountain lion, the puma type.
And indeed, we occasionally get people reporting the mountain lion as a lioness.
And they do look like lionesses.
And of course, that's their name, mountain lion is for that reason.
So we do get regular reports.
I was literally last night following up a report within three miles of Birdlip Hill, that lookout, and just around the sort of curve of the corner, around the Cotswold Edge there, somebody had reported a link on a Facebook site and including the Gloucestershire Facebook site.
And of course, that's only 20 minutes from where I live.
So I thought, well, I need an evening walk anyway before I speak to Howard Hughes at 10 to 11.
It'll be a nice one to talk about.
And the guy was credible.
Now, I always feel that 80, 90% of the reports seem credible and consistent and get into the detail.
Now, why did I think his was credible?
Well, he reported a lynx-like cat.
He didn't call it a lynx.
He just described it as a lynx.
And then when he was asked by the lead admin person of the Gloucestershire Facebook group to suggest, could he look at on internet Google images of the cats that might match what he saw, he did pick a lynx and without knowing what other Eurasian lynx is.
And he said, this is the one that it looked most like with its tail up.
Now, they've got a very short, stubby tail, and sometimes when they're spooked, they do signal the tail up, just like some deer do as well.
And so that made it, you know, that detail is what you're looking for, makes it more credible.
And the location is one which is thick woodland on the edge of that Cotswold edge, what you call the escarpment.
As I've mentioned before, Howard, on your show, I think the cats, not that there would be many there at any one time, they would patrol, any cat in that area would patrol that where the woodland meets the pasture because that's where the deer come out.
And indeed, we saw one last night when we were following up that report.
We didn't, unfortunately, see any signs of a big cat, any droppings or scratch marks or eviscerated deer carcasses, but we did see a roe doe and her fawn.
And I was thinking, hmm, that fawn is exactly what that cat, that lynx, is going to be looking for for its next meal.
You know, a vulnerable, smaller prey item is exactly what it's there for.
And is it easy in a case like that, or very difficult, as I suspect, to be able to work out the backstory of the animal or animals that you are tracing?
No, it isn't really, because the trouble is you don't know, if they're not reported again, you don't know if that's because nobody's seen one or because it's moved on or because it's died.
It's rare for people to give you ongoing reports of the same animal.
Now, that did happen a few years ago in the Stroud area, which is only 10 miles south of where I was last night.
And this lady said, and to Frank Tunbridge, my buddy here, she said, I've seen one six times across the valley going across the same route.
And I reckon I could probably film it.
And she was wanting to help us because she didn't like the way sometimes in the follow-up comments in a local newspaper, there were some scoffers, and she felt it was, you know, she'd seen one and she wanted to get back at the scoffers.
Now, it's never a good idea to do that.
You've just got to keep your composure and just go with it and research the subject for the good of the subject, really.
But it was rare for somebody like that to routinely see the same cat going on the same route.
And we don't think in this country they use the same routes as much as they would overseas because they've got looser territories.
If you're a black leopard in India or a black leopard in the Malay Peninsula, you're probably hemmed in.
There's plenty of other territories around you, so you need to stick to your routes.
It wouldn't be the same here with low numbers.
But anyway, she claimed she saw this one going routinely.
And so Frank gave her an old video camera.
And he and I did not think we'd ever hear from her again.
Within a month, she said, I filmed it.
And she had, yeah, she'd got it from her bedroom window across the valley in the distance, zoomed in, held still.
Of course, with a handheld video camera, you've really got to hold your hand still at a distance.
And it was filmed.
A guy who's a specialist in leopards and a zoologist, filmmaker, came and scaled it.
And that's been part for a documentary.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been much good filmed since to go with it.
But that was filmed at that was reference, scale reference, a repeat bit of footage was done with a prop to superimpose the two bits of footage to show the scale.
And it was three and a half foot long in the body, two and a half foot long in the tail, so six foot total.
And what it was doing when she filmed it, the pasture had just been cut and it seemed to be foraging rather than being an ambush predator.
It was just foraging.
And it seems it was just looking for stranded rodents, just like foxes do and seagulls do and domestic cats do when the grass has been cut and the mice and foals are easy pickings.
Wow.
So, I mean, it just goes to show that it is possible to track these things, but it takes somebody like you and your colleagues with a bit of dedication to be able to do it.
Now, look, when I was a kid and when you were a kid, the population that we were taught of the United Kingdom was something like 57 to 59 million, somewhere around that kind of area, and it didn't change for years.
In more recent years, our population has rocketed to I think 66, 67, 68 million, whatever.
That means, of course, that there is constant pressure for land.
And I heard only today a politician discussing again the need to build more housing.
What do you think that is going to mean for the habitats of these elusive creatures?
Do you think that they're going to be forced out of their habitats?
Are we going to see conflicts?
Or are we just going to see them die out?
I think it will just mean that the ones that have territories closer to urban edges do have to adapt.
And the ones that are in remoter locations that are hardly ever seen will carry on with their lives.
I mean, I remember one businessman in North Devon, Somerset, North Devon area, saying the one he saw, he thought he might be the only, very rarely seen.
It was such a remote, rugged landscape.
And it was a small back lane near a rocky cliff in North Exmoor.
And he said, so few people live and farm there.
That black leopard, if it was a black leopard, has got the place to itself.
It'll hardly ever be seen in its life.
And I think that's true for a lot of them, perhaps.
And the ones in some of the ones in remote Scotland would be the same.
But ones closer to the edges of our towns and suburbs, I still think they can manage well because I sometimes get asked to follow up reports that seem to be along the edges of motorways.
And although you think, well, that's very busy and noisy, actually, if you go in motorway underpasses like I do or roadside verges, you actually think there's lots of litter, there's lots of noise and fumes, there's lots of signs of human activity, but there aren't any humans.
You know, there's plenty of rabbits and there's plenty of deer signs.
And the animals use this as their own sort of little secret wildlife corridor.
And they know it's noisy, but they know that noise is not a threat to them.
So an ambush predator would use that noise to mask its movements, to get its prey.
So actually, I think they can manage around human settlements quite well.
They're just so good at adapting and so stealthy that we wouldn't know it anyway.
I had no idea they were quite so adaptable, but now I know.
This year, and that's how we came into contact, there has been an absolute flurry.
I know that the tabloid newspapers in a time of COVID-19 and the many tragedies around that, they're scrambling for stories that aren't to do with coronavirus to put in the newspapers.
So there have been a lot of big cat stories in the last few months.
But this began, I think, in 2020, earlier in the year, before coronavirus was on the front page every day.
And just to give you a few recent examples, and there are many, if we work backwards from May, for example, which is just, you know, days ago from when I'm recording this, 16th of May, a big black cat has yet again, quotes, been reported prowling in Devon close to a decapitated lamb, says, quotes, a spooked local.
Also in May, cluster of sightings in Fife, Scotland.
April, a huge wild cat, the size of a Labrador with, quotes, big claws has been pictured roaming around a back garden in Cambridge.
You and I talked about that one on the radio, so hang five for a second now.
We know about that.
February, a dark, mysterious creature ran across rather a country lane last night, prompting some question to question whether the legendary beast of Bodmin is on the prowl again.
Reports of cats roaming around Cornwall are nothing new, with hundreds of sightings recorded over the years, that particular organ of the newspaper industry reports.
So a lot of things being reported, and that doesn't even get into the stories of people, for example, looking out of their kitchen window and seeing something big, black, hairy with large teeth looking back at them.
There have been a tremendous flurry of sightings, and of course there was a big flurry only a week or so ago when police were called out in North London for something that was thought to be a big cat.
So there are many, many sightings being reported.
Some of them may be the real deal.
Many of them may not be.
But what do you think is behind this huge uptick, apart from the newspaper's quest for stories, in sightings this year?
Yes, I do think it's more that it's the silly season, Howard, and that it is a sort of interesting antidote, alternative story to some of the more dreary and sort of the more difficult news we're having to swallow at the moment.
So I think it's an exciting sort of great outdoors mystery story that the press does like.
And some of those ones you've just cited, I don't think are very credible.
A couple of them I do, I think are.
It can go in flurries in the media.
And I think sometimes the media are okay about taking ones that are a little bit iffy.
I think sometimes journalists and editors want a photo or something behind it more than just what looks like a dog print, but somebody's claimed it's a cat print.
So it gets in and then it gets in a local newspaper and then is syndicated and cascades onto the tabloids.
And really, it was just a dog print in the first place anyway.
But what you're not seeing within all of that media noise is you're not seeing what the likes of myself and my friend Frank Tunbridge and counterparts elsewhere in the country getting, which is the more routine reports that we get because people find us on the internet or email us or phone us and whatever and want to have a quiet word with us about what's happening on their land or the report, what they've seen and encountered.
And so most of those people say, please keep it quiet, please keep it low-key, we don't want to rumble, we don't want to open the Pandora's box.
And so it's that consistency of witnesses that's very interesting, that people see that it's awkward.
They don't want to scare other people.
They know that they might get ridiculed.
They don't want to blight their area.
Some people have got businesses on the land, not just farms, and even this goes for utilities and people who you think would be more okay about a wider number of people knowing about big cats.
People are incredibly cautious and wary about sort of wider knowledge of the subject.
And that's something that ticks all the boxes.
If you get somebody who's not like that, you think, well, hang on, this is a different type of report.
I'm not sure that they didn't want to suss me out.
They didn't want to be cautious about it.
It's maybe not such a credible report.
So you're saying then, basically, if I'm reading you right here, that the best reports are the ones that you get, but these are the reports that will not appear in the newspapers.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
I don't need to sound sort of arrogant and whatever, but occasionally we do ask people, because it's useful for a report to be in the newspaper because we know that we'll get follow-up reports.
So, for example, one report of the one that's in Gloucester at the moment, still doing the rounds in the press of the three sisters seeing one in an urban part of Gloucester, although I do think it came down from the Cotswold Edge landscape that we talked about earlier.
That was reported to Frank Tunbridge, and I think he actually said to them, you know, do you mind this going in the press for wider knowledge, but also because it might help us get more reports?
Now, they were okay about that.
I don't think they gave away the precise location, but the general location was known.
And we've now had seven more reports since then.
And that was only three weeks ago, mid-May.
So that's been useful to us because we followed up other reports.
It seemed credible as a result.
But yes, the majority of reports are only given to the actual recorders, although, of course, they come into Facebook groups.
And so a more wider community would see those.
And some journalists do look at the Facebook groups and report them on into their newspapers.
Right.
So when you see a story in the tabloid newspapers, like the one, for example, in Cambridge, which I think you'll tell me that this is so, was first of all reported by excited newspapers as being a potential wild cat in Cambridge.
And later, I think, turned out to be a misidentification of a large domestic cat.
Yes.
Those are the kinds of things we're more likely to see in the papers.
Yes, exactly.
And I think once you see a photograph, I think majority of the photographs that are in the papers are just feral cats or large feral cats or these designer cats, these unusual sort of pets that people have, because they're easy to photograph.
It's not very easy to photograph a proper black leopard doing its thing, skulking and being furtive in the landscape.
But we can come on to photographs and why it's difficult to take photographs if you want, however, that's a key part of the equation.
Let's do that now because that all builds in to the whole mystique of them, I think, of big cats, the fact that they are so elusive.
And if you want to take a picture, the reason there are so few pictures and those that there are are often fuzzy and at a distance is that they don't want to be photographed.
You know, they are almost as elusive as some movie stars.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the key times when people see them, not always, but a key time for witnesses seeing them is dawn and dusk.
So common in the data is the first dog walker in an area in the morning at dawn.
It's called crepuscular.
Crepuscular times, twilight times, is a key time when these cats are out because that's when they're going for the deer as well, they're going for their prey.
So the first dog walker in the morning in an area and the last one at night, it's quite common for those kinds of people to be a good proportion of the witnesses.
But of course, at those times, it's very difficult to get a clear photograph, even if one was close enough.
And I would say about 20% of the witnesses have got a dog or a horse with them.
So how are you going to get your mobile phone out and click it into action and control your dog or your horse as well?
So that's 20% of the people wiped off.
There's also the people at dawn and dusk can't take a good one.
Now, if one is close enough to you to take a good photograph, the chances are you are going to be pretty unnerved, if not scared about it.
So you're in the moment watching it cautiously, not thinking, oh, I must document this and get my mobile phone to work and snap away.
So we're chipping away at the chances of getting a photograph.
Now, I think the times when people do get them is when they're in the distance and people got enough time to get over the shock and think, oh, get my mobile phone out.
But by that time, even if people try and zoom in, it's too much of a blob and too indistinct.
So I would say, you know, only 10% of witnesses have probably got a chance of getting it on their mobile phone.
And we just get a few blobs that are inconclusive and not very influential as a result.
Of the sightings that you've checked out personally, what has been for you the best one?
What sighting is in your personal Pantheon Hall of Fame?
Well, I only heard about it, but it is local to me.
And I like it because it's so unusual, but it's very believable.
And a guy was on Cleve Hill, a big part of the Cotswolds, just around from Birdlip Hill.
And you can see it from Cheltenham race course.
You probably see it on the telly, a big wild bit of the edge of the Cotswolds.
And we get big hat reports there.
We've had one very recently from a lady who was a sceptic, seeing one run across the road there.
And this was a kite flyer a few years ago.
And he said, I was up with the other kite flyers in the far bit of Cleve Hill.
And it was a balmy summer evening.
And I was last one back.
And I had my kite on a long string.
And as I landed it, out from the gorse, a black panther absolutely ran at it to attack it.
And then suddenly withdrew and sniffed all around and realized it was a false alarm and it was attacking an inanimate object and just withdrew.
But he was very scared.
And his girlfriend was with him.
I got this report after I did a talk in the local area.
And his girlfriend said, I could tell how absolutely shocked he was because it was just seconds afterwards he phoned me to tell me what had happened.
And of course, I get that quite a bit, Howard.
I get every month or so, I'll have somebody on the phone minutes after, or a couple of hours when they got back home and looked on the internet, you know, soon after they've had an encounter, and they'll be telling me about it.
And I can still sense the emotional impact on it over the phone.
And it helps you, helps the believability of it.
And also the sort of caveats that people put and the conditions.
They often start by saying, now, look, before I tell you this, you know, I don't want you bringing any people with guns to the area.
I don't want you telling the police.
They really do want it kept under the radar, and it's so common.
Now, that's interesting.
If there is, perhaps adjacent to a heavily populated area, and I don't know whether this scenario has actually transpired, has actually played out, but if there is a big cat that is suspected to be in an area and it is reported to the authorities, local council is told about it, the police are told about it, what are they expected to do about it?
What course of action do they take?
Do they try and remove it?
Do they try and cage it and take it away somewhere?
What's the usual plan of action?
Yeah, and of course, the issue on that is if you get a helicopter up, the disturbance, well, a cat will go to ground very quickly with any disturbance.
And a helicopter is the last thing that you want to send out for a cat because you will not be able to monitor one and pursue one with something like a helicopter or a large number of noisy bumbling.
I'm hoping that the enlightened approach that would be taken would be, these things are in the main no threat unless you are directly threatening them.
And even then, they'll try and get away from you.
I would hope the enlightened approach would be live and let live.
Yes.
And if it was America and one was problematic and needed intercepting because it was overdoing the livestock killing or if it was a threat to people in their residential environment, they would use trained hounds that the hunters use as well.
And those hounds follow it by scent and they would corner it and send it up a tree and dart it or dispatch it.
And often I'm afraid they do have to dispatch it, even though local people in those situations don't want that to happen because sometimes if you dart them, it can take a while for the drug to have an effect.
And so in that sort of minute or two minutes, the cat could be a problem, you know, and a risk in that situation before it's going fully drowsy.
So we don't have that kind of system in Britain, and we have lots of roads and infrastructure that hounds couldn't chase a cat over.
So very, very difficult.
I think often the police, when they are called out, it's mainly only for reassurance anyway.
But the police forces do genuinely have people on their books for recovering dangerous animals that can do, that are trained in marksmanship and have got the right sort of drug.
They have to assess the animal and the weight of the animal to get the right sort of drug formula in the dart, basically, or they would dispatch it if it was too much of a risk.
But yeah, it's certainly not something which we have the skill and experience of doing for big cats in this country.
Right.
I should say very quickly that it's rare for me to meet a witness that wants a cat sort of removed, if you like, removed, intercepted and removed because it's causing a problem.
But actually, coincidentally, I spoke to two people yesterday who were in that situation.
One of them was a manageress of a stables, and it's a stables where there's racehorses and retired racehorses.
So it's high, you know, important, high-value assets, basically, that need protecting.
And they've had a cat been seen and sensed for two or three years.
And about every six months or so, it seems to turn up because they sometimes see it, but they also read the signs of the horses.
And the last week, the horses have really been playing up.
One of them actually broke through its stable wall.
It's a sort of timber wall.
And sometimes they've been almost uncontrollable in the last few days.
And you can imagine that people are not happy.
You know, lots of people are, as I've said before on your shows, are very tolerant, if not really positive and fascinated and protectionist even about the cats.
But you can understand if it's really bugging you, if you have horses to look after, that that would be an issue.
So that lady, although she doesn't want it killed or dispatched, she wants something done as difficult as it is.
And the other lady I spoke to yesterday is a lady farmer, sheep farmer, and she's had four years worth of ongoing sheep predation, and majority of it does look cat-like.
She's seen it several times.
And although, yeah, she definitely does not want it killed, but she does want her sheep, you know, she says, I'm absolutely fed up of every 10 days or so finding a predated sheep, sometimes a ram as well, a high-value ram.
And also, it's not fun to go out at dawn or dusk or whatever and be unnerved.
She's not scared for her life, but she is feeling, you know, there's a big predator around.
It's not, you know, fun for those kinds of people.
So we must give them, spare them a thought when we're thinking how romantic it is these big cats around.
It's a question of their livelihood, isn't it?
And that is a different situation altogether.
It's a hard one to handle.
Last thing I want to ask you, I've never asked you this on any of the shows we've done.
So here on the podcast, I will ask it, and I promised my listener I would.
How does the phenomenon, because we've talked about the United Kingdom as this being a sort of British or United Kingdom phenomenon, but obviously other countries have these things.
How does the development of a population in the United Kingdom, how is that reflected in, say, for example, our European neighbours or Australia, New Zealand, Canada, places like that?
Do they have similar stories to tell or is it different everywhere?
I mentioned Australia earlier.
It seems very similar in Australia that they have the same two main big candidate cats that were trophy pets and were released mascots and guarding animals for mining claims in Australia.
So black panthers and sandy brown puma-like mountain lion cats are seen routinely in Australia in a much sort of bigger, wilder environment.
They also have feral cats in Australia, which is a big problem as well.
They think some of those might have got bigger as well, perhaps.
But beyond Australia, there doesn't seem to be what you might think of as a naturalising population anywhere else.
You do get escaped exotic animals in other European countries And sometimes seen in New Zealand as well.
So I think those are just a few vagrant escapees, which include, and sometimes you might see a spotted leopard amongst that contingent as well.
Certainly on my podcast, I did an episode with a guy, a Brit from Spain, who had one on his roof.
He just felt this animal on his roof and thought that even just after a few seconds, he assessed what it would be.
And he thought, there's an animal on my roof.
Don't think it's a goat.
Don't think it's a wild boar.
He went through all the sort of indigenous candidates and he thought, it's so powerful, it's so lithe, it's so athletic.
It sounds like a cat.
He then later saw a Black Panther several times in the gloom and so did some of his guests, even without, and he didn't tell his guests that there was a loose Black Panther.
And all the signs were that that one was a release one from a bit of a rogue circus that left town in a hurry and was not, didn't have all its sort of paperwork in order and release one.
And that one was, when it was seen, it was much more, it wasn't behaving and it was more traumatized and it seemed a bit more bewildered.
It didn't seem a natural wild one like we get in Britain.
So you get these one-offs.
I think Australia is the only similar country with a parallel situation.
I would have thought Spain would be ideal.
If you think of, if you've been to the south of Spain, which of course many of us Brits do, go there quite regularly.
You know, you've got the coast which is heavily populated.
That's where the resorts are.
That's where the fun is.
But then you very quickly go inland and then you rise massively into the mountains and you cross those mountains and immediately you're into a very remote looking kind of area.
There's, you know, there are pine trees and shale and a lot of open space where big cats, I would imagine, could thrive were they to have them.
I mean, maybe they have them and they're just not being reported in the way that they would be here.
Well, in parts of Spain and Portugal, they have the beautiful Iberian lynx, which is in perilously low numbers.
So, yeah, as you say, it's a perfect environment for that cat, which can kill deer, but it lives mainly on rabbits.
And when the rabbits get diseased, it gets killed on the road, unfortunately, the Iberian lynx in Spain.
And it suffers when there are problems in the rabbit populations as well.
So, yes, but it is a perfect environment for cats, certainly.
Oh, Rick, I'm glad we had time to do this.
We're out of time now, and I thank you very much.
You know, you have time to have a more expansive conversation than perhaps we can have on the radio.
You always have that sort of adrenaline rush.
You've got commercials to get in and news reports and stuff.
So doing it on the podcast is nice.
And I'm very happy to introduce you to my audience on the podcast, which is more international, I think, than just UK.
If people want to check you out, which I'm sure they will, where do they go online?
They can go to bigcatconversations.com or just Google BigCat Conversations.
They'll get the website and the podcast episodes.
Or they can just on their podcast, if they use podcast platforms, just type in BigCat Conversations and they'll get the fortnightly podcast.
Wow.
So much to talk about.
And I'm sure we've got plenty to talk about in a future conversation.
Rick Minter, thank you.
Pleasure.
Thank you very much, Howard.
Well, the very diligent and remarkable researcher, Rick Minter, Big Cat Conversations is his thing, and we will speak with him again.
I wanted to get him on the podcast, and I'm really pleased that we did.
Please let me know what you thought about him.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can send me a message of any kind from there.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection