DNA confirms there IS a big cat roaming the British countryside | Hacker News Reader

DNA confirms there IS a big cat roaming the British countryside

discoverwildlife.com

156 pointsthrowaway3837588 comments

I was camping and hitchhiking in the Lakes with a friend about 12 years ago. We aimed to get over High Street (a large hill) and to the next bothy within a day but it was harder than we expected, so we ended up setting off down the other side well after nightfall. The moon was out so light wasn't really a problem, but we were both a bit freaked out by not really knowing exactly where we were or what the weather might do (this was in January, and a blizzard did come through the next day - but even in summer you have to be careful there). There was about 6 inches of snow over everything and it was hard going on the way down - with lots of tripping over hidden rocks and worrying about slipping into cracks or over the edges of waterfalls etc - so we were both getting increasingly agitated.

Anyway, about half way down we came upon some large animal footprints and stopped to look at them. They were very clear and we both thought they could have been big cat prints. They looked too big for a dog, and the location and time of year didn't make that much sense for casual dog walking and there were no other human prints around. We still had a few miles to go and camping out in tents or in a sheep shelter for the night was very much on the table, so I think we both decided to just put the idea of a big cat out of our minds, to the extent we took it seriously to begin with. Makes me wonder!

>They looked too big for a dog

Aren't larger dog breeds about the same size as big cats? Looking it up, a small English mastiff is larger than a big leopard for example.

An escaped dog seems far more likely than an escaped big cat.

Yeah, could have been a dog. I would say a dog with a human and we just didn't see the person's tracks is more likely than escaped though as we were miles from the nearest house and I think an escaped dog would have had the sense not to walk half way up High Street by itself in that weather. One thing about these prints is they were very clean though. This looked like something that was walking, as opposed to bounding this way and that like a dog sometimes does. All pure speculation of course, but with a dog + human I would expect them to be either walking together, or for the dog to be running around chaotically, still fairly close to the person.

>as we were miles from the nearest house and I think an escaped dog would have had the sense not to walk half way up High Street by itself in that weather.

They could have escaped a while ago and been living in the area.

Basically any scenario where you can imagine a big cat showing up a dog could do the same thing, probably more likely to as wolves at least were native to Britain.

Hmm, semi-wild dogs seems less likely to me as they'd have to hang around settlements to get food, in which case they'd get noticed and dealt with. Unless you mean they can hunt in packs and take down sheep?

Dogs are capable of hunting small game, as well as eating things like berries. Or maybe they hadn't been there that long, just longer than a day.

From my perspective, I'd assume dog until I got overwhelming evidence it was a big cat. There are far more dogs in Britain than big cats for a start.

It would appear this is not the first bit of evidence suggesting that Alien Big Cats (ABCs) are a real thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_big_cats#Proven_captur...

I should add, the "Alien" in ABC denotes alien to the country they were found in. Not alien to planet Earth! :)

I'm in favour of an apocalypse caused by a swarm of giant alien murder cats rather than the cliche skynet outcome.

I can imagine them climbing on top of cathedrals or tower apartment blocks and curling up on the roofs to soak in the sunlight while the buildings precariously creak under the cats' weight and eventually collapse. The giant cats unfazed move to the next cathedral ... that would be a very British giant cat apocalypse.

To get people to accept a monster, show them a bigger monster.

While we let AI take over, we will rest easy it won’t be as bad as skynet.

Planet of the Apes but swap out apes with murder kittens.

Easily distracted by giant balls of knitting wool ;)

Their one Achilles Heel.

Or a laser pointer.

See also: one of the books in The Laundry Files series by 'cstross.

Why not both? I mean, the standard Skynet murder robots/nuclear apocalypse scenario is indeed boring. Skynet x AlphaFold solving protein folding and hitting us with molecular nanotech? Swarms of giant murder cats would be on the table.

Humanity survived the attack in 1971. We can do it again.

If you're reading this, you are the resistance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr6CyU-Ev_M

> Not alien to planet Earth!

"Speaker to Animals" was a Kzinti name, popular enough among fen of the era that I've even seen it on a business card as a job title. (IIRC, for a sales engineer?)

There ain’t no justice.

I confess to some scepticism. The lady concerned seems to be a dedicated big cat believer, with seven sightings already[0]. If other witnesses had been present, I would be more accepting of the claim.

[0] https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/19808796.cumbrias-sharon-...

Agree, it reminds me a bit of the guy who was really obsessed by the mh370 mystery and happens to have found more pieces of the plane than anyone else. It’s certainly possible, but I remain skeptical

I mean, several of those parts has matching serial numbers with the corresponding parts installed on MH-370. I'm not sure how one could fake that without a lot of nonpublic information.

And didn't the dude in question walk along the entire coastline of Madagascar looking for washed up debris? That's certainly a plausible reason to find them.

Isn't that a little like saying archaeologists seem to find a suspiciously large number of historical objects, or tornado hunters seem to have a suspiciously large number of tornado sightings?

I think the problem os being only a single witness claiming to have sighted them? The Loch Ness monster has more reported sightings, so a single witness, imo, is not enough to say with a large degree of certainty that there is a big cat roaming around.

I’m not saying I believe there is a big cat roaming but it’s still unfair to say there’s only been one witness when this is something frequently reported on by multiple unrelated individuals.

Both of those cases tend to have significant evidence and is generally verifiable by others. Although there have be archeological frauds too.

Indeed — but with the caveat of assuming accurate journalism and that this really is a good DNA test and result and no caveats were removed in the reporting.

Newspapers are like LLMs: when I'm not already a domain expert I have no way to determine their accuracy, but when I am they're often at least a bit wrong in some important way. This is also known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Non-archaeologists find historical objects, and as a former midwesterner, I can assure you that you need no particular background to be able to see tornadoes. It would, indeed, be very suspicious if _only_ those interested in archaeology or tornadoes claimed to observe these.

My partner has seen them twice from close up (<10m), in the Cambridgeshire area. But this was in the late 90’s.

Very skeptical. I would also like more detail in the article, what was the DNA collected from? Hair? Saliva? How was it stored, collected and tested? Who sent it in? This website has a bit of detail around what can be tested: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/archaeobotany...

Sheffield, a city with a lot of terraced housing, is particularly prone to "big cat scares", the usual story being that it moves around in the roof-spaces of the adjoined terraces. I lived next door to a lovely little old lady who was convinced that the noises in her attic were from an errant leopard rather than a pigeon.

That's hilarious. Have they checked there's not something in the environment turning people mad? Is it even common for terraced houses to share roof space without a dividing wall??

They tend to be built in 4s, with a covered alleyway between the two middle ones (a "gennel" in local parlance), the roof ends have supporting walls of course, the middle ones sometimes have brick, sometimes just wood and a panel-wall to support the (always slate) roof proper.

As to madness, almost certainly, they're all barking (in an agreeable way).

It's very unlikely any unreported big cats have escaped into the UK countryside since the late 1970s (when the Dangerous Wild Animals act basically outlawed them as pets and some owners let them loose in the wild).

It would be quite amazing for there to be enough animals to maintain a mating population of atleast 3 or 4 generations since then without them being seen much more frequently.

My partner has had two (very) close up sightings and she said sightings among her peer group were common enough that no one thought it was that big a deal.

This was in the late 90’s though. There are certainly enough sheep and rabbits in the English countryside to support a small population of big cats.

Do Panthers carry off their prey to eat? It seems surprising that there aren't regular reports of farmers finding sheep that have been half-eaten.

What species of panther ? Leopards definetly do, they even drag carcasses up trees. Lions, Tigers and Jaguars usually eat in place.

But they are reported quite frequently.

I live in East Anglia and there is at least one sighting every couple of years, often with significantly blurry photo evidence of a dark, pantherine animal, 100m+ away. It's relegated to the "and finally" segment of local news.

I don't think I believe it either but the British countryside is vast, well stocked. An animal like this could evade human contact if it wanted.

While there are definately parallels with bigfoot sightings here, I can personally vouch for how rare cat sightings are.

I have spent a lot of my life in deep wildernes, and the only time I saw a big cat in the wild was when I was a kid (aprox 14yo), up in mid- British Columbia (Canada), literally a hundred miles from any town.

I was alone, waiting at our truck while the family was checking if a side-road was traversable. (My dad was a big wilderness fisher). maybe half a kilometer down the "main" (dirt) road, I saw a huge cat casually walk across the road, into the forest on the other side.

It looked completely black, but likely because the side facing me was in shade. Cougars are the only big cat native to the area.

Of course my dad dismissed my account as daydreaming.

I have seen bear, bobcat, and even Coyotee in the wild. Not wolf though.

I can corroborate. I grew up somewhere where we heard cougars regularly (for those of you who don't know, they scream at night - it's a distinctive, spooky sound), and spent a lot of time in the woods. My ambition was to spot one, but though I found scat and paw prints and deer I was pretty sure they'd killed I never saw one in the flesh.

A neighbor found one dead, one time. (Dead from illness; I never heard of one being hit by a car - I think they're too smart for that.) A few other people I know were luckier, and had sightings, all of them too brief to photograph.

I'm skeptical about British big cats, but think it's plausible that (if they exist) they could remain all-but-invisible, and agree that corroboration would be likeliest by spoor or DNA, not by sight.

Edit to add: My totally amateur guess is that they wouldn't be cougars, because they scream, and I've never seen anyone reporting hearing that in the UK; and they're not likely to be leopards, because they hang out in trees, and are relatively easy to spot when they do. I'd say jaguars, which do neither, and occasionally come in a black variant. I'm still skeptical, but that it is remotely plausible - magnitudes more plausible than Bigfoot! - makes it an intriguing story.

> I never heard of one being hit by a car - I think they're too smart for that.

It happens frequently enough [1] [2]. Both of those are in areas where the cats aren’t supposed to exist!

> I'd say jaguars, which do neither, and occasionally come in a black variant.

Yep, the article says that the DNA matched a leopard

[1] https://m.startribune.com/cougar-spotted-in-minneapolis-kill...

[2] https://kanecountyconnects.com/article/MountainLion-KaneCoun...

That is to assume that people are not illegally breeding, selling and keeping big cats today in Britain - people who keep one of these cats and lose it (or set it 'free' when it becomes to problematic to look after), would not be approaching the authorities.

There a surprisingly large trade in illegal animals in the UK - most people will know nothing about it. But check out recent new articles about dumped snakes and giant tortoises https://eastdevonnews.co.uk/2024/02/13/east-devon-police-inv.... Local to me a man was arrested for breeding Savannah cats.

No idea about the UK, but in Brazil, in a highly populated area between Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Santa Catarina, in the mountains where rainforest is still preserved (Serra do Mar and Serra da Mantiqueira), it's know that there are big cats (locally called onça). This video shows some great footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeDfeGR_kxI

I lived in that area most of my youth (but not in the last 20 years) and was outdoors a lot. I've never seen one of these animals, and didn't know anyone that had seen one (except for the rare dead animal found in the woods, or live animal that got trapped somewhere like a farm shed in some faraway farm). They're absolutely masters in not being seen... so I don't doubt there could be a few in the UK and nobody manages to get a good look at them.

EDIT : for those saying the big cats are dangerous, to my knowledge they're extremely shy and stay the hell away from people. I would be surprised if they've been known to attack, let alone kill someone in the last several decades (they talk about that in the video, but it's in portuguese).

Unless those big cats were dispersed in >5 numbers in the same area how are they supposed to reproduce? This problem will just solve itself in a couple of (cat) years

The problem may no longer exist in a few years, but children used to playing in a deemed-safe countryside might be at risk in the meantime.

The groups far more likely at risk from being attacked by big cats roaming the countryside would be ramblers and dog walkers, especially older folk.

I think we are long past the era when kids would run off for miles into the countryside, unaccompanied by an adult.

Plus if it did have a taste for humans, we’d already have reports of people being attacked by now. So if there is a big cat, and that’s a big “if”, then it’s more likely the cat is at risk from farmers shooting a predictor to the farm’s livestock, than kids are at risk from the cat

  > I think we are long past the era when kids would run off for miles into the countryside, unaccompanied by an adult.

That's horrible. In my country it is still possible. Maybe not "miles" into the field, but a few hundred meters, sure.

The different between a few hundred meters and a few miles is pretty darn significant. A literal order of magnitude in fact

At 13, I regularly solitarily ventured about 15 miles away (5 miles as the crow flies) by bicycle.

And how many years ago was that?

I used to venture far when I was 13. Times are different now

I'll take a wild guess that kids in rural Kenya venture quite far when there is no other form of transportation.

Children are at risk by cars, not cats...

I believe this to be true. I remember some college or high school age people drove an old VW Beetle within an inch of my rear tire in the bike lane, honked repeated, and thought it would be funny if I fell and they ran me over.

Nature, uh, finds a way.

Keep absolutely still. Its vision is based on movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W85oD8FEF78

(1) Put female leopard in heat in cage. (2) Surround cage with trail cams. (3) Wait.

I can't understand why this documentary hasn't been made yet.

However, if they're out there, I'd like to know why we don't get reports of treed carcasses. You'd think a dead sheep in a tree would attract comment.

> 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.

I'm failing to see why that's an argument that favors leopards over jaguars.

There’s been DNA evidence for years:

2023: https://www.discoverwildlife.com/news/new-dna-evidence-confi...

2022: https://www.nationalworld.com/news/uk/big-cat-sightings-wher...

2003, and 2005: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-167605...

Bit shoddy to make a categorical claim in the headline, when the immediate next line basically says "Or maybe not?"

My sister in law saw a mountain lion a few years ago where she lives in suburban Pittsburgh. They supposedly are not there according to the state. They’ve also been seen in Ohio, Kentucky, etc. where authorities claim they no longer exist.

These animals are incredibly stealthy. Do a web search for “can you spot the mountain lion” or similar things and you’ll find a lot of photos where it will take you minutes to find one. Saw one a few years back of a woman taking a selfie getting photobombed by one that couldn’t have been more than ten feet behind her. Could barely see it.

Luckily they rarely attack humans.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were a large enough population in the UK to be sustainable. I've been hearing stories about black leopard sightings since I was a kid, and geographically they are quite far apart.

These animals are pretty shy and mostly hunt at night. It was only recently that we managed to obtain footage of them hunting at night in an area of the world where they are fairly common.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-68665332

What is "big cat DNA"? Are there not multiple species of big cat? Can a DNA test not be more specific?

Edit: Answering my own question about the methods used: The story links to Robin Allaby's page [1] about his DNA test service. That page says he tests for "the Panthera, Puma and Lynx genera". An older story [2] describes Allaby's methods: 450 PCRs and ~600 sequence reactions. "The team searched for two gene targets each of deer and canid, but over 30 different cat gene targets."

[1]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/research/archaeobotany...

[2]: https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/research_i...

This is a potential problem in any country where people can get away with illegally obtaining wild animals as "pets". They're cute and manageable when they're young but the time will come when they're full-grown and it's easier to just release them than admit to the authorities you've been harboring a dangerous wild animal.

I once saw what appeared to be a mountain lion in northwestern Nevada. I couldn’t believe my eyes — it was moving parallel to the side of the road; I convinced myself I must have been hallucinating.

Years later, I stumbled across 3 dead cows within a 5-10 mile span, all in various states of decay, also in Nevada. Spoke with a ranger and they offered that it might have been a mountain lion (I had assumed they were hit by cars).

I then mentioned my experience from years prior, and the ranger said that mountain lions often hang out near roadways, as it’s an easy spot to find/observe deer and livestock.

Based in the wikipedia link "hantom sightings are common throughout much of the UK, with BBC Wildlife Magazine in 2006 reporting the "top ten" counties or regions of Great Britain where claims of sightings had been between April 2004 and July 2005 were as follows..."

What does this mean? Do we have to assume they have started breeding?

Edit: Sightings since the early 90ies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQYrszfSbUE

I think it is safe to assume the little kitties have started breeding.

A couple more noteworthy examples:

https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/14/big-cat-hunters-have-proof-ru...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/22/it-was-a-big-c...

My apologies for the abysmal UK news websites!

This is a lot like the western mountain lion in the eastern US. People say they see them or hear them but there never seems to be any hard evidence. The theory is that the eastern mountain lion is extinct and any possible mountain lion is escaped from captivity or has traveled from the western states. (FL has a panther population, but that is a different distinct subspecies).

It would be interesting if the DNA is not a hoax and they eventually find the animal and it's origin.

Having lived near mountain lions, it was hard to believe any could be hidden given how loud they are. Looking it up, their roars seem associated with mating or territory battles, so if there were only one it's possible it'd be quiet.

Some of the reports I know of were around a captive lion. They said they could hear other lions calling (or responding) to the captive one.

That seems like a scenario where it'd be very easy to collect evidence, though looking it up there are numerous confirmed sightings in Eastern states so they probably did set up a recorder.

The one about the calling was a long time ago, before cheap digital recording would allow. Most of the sightings these days are people misidentifying other animals (bobcats, house cats, etc). A few turnbout to be real but are escaped or migrated from the western states or Canada. I think the last true eastern lion was in the 1930s in Maine or something.

Well if the presence of big cats is advertised in the news, you can be sure that a bunch of morons will comb that part of land to get a chance to shoot the beasts and hang their heads to the walls.

Seems like a fair reaction to a dangerous non-native predator.

Jaguars and panthers to a lesser extent used to live over the entire globe so really andy habitat where there’s little enough human interaction can support them

The emphasized word should've been A. Where I lived last had more than one puma concolor and ursus americanus.

It's the Cat People! Just ask Nastassia Kinski <cue David Bowie singing>

I preferred The Hunger (1983): Bowie/Deneuve/Sarandon

Me too, but I had a thing for Nastassia then when I was 18. Later, finding out how she was exploited by Polanski and others, I felt so bad for her. Hollywood is a dark place. I liked Tess, since I had read the Thomas Hardy novel in high school before seeing the film.

I have no idea how much limited editions of Dame ONJ AC DBE in sweatband and leg warmers may be going for (and not that my room at 18 were ever decorated in this manner), but were you still to have a thing for Nastassja, each of the few hundred Avedon portraits seem to very roughly be going for ~$64k.

It's Bagheera

A leopard? In Britain? It probably escaped from the zoo.

A private collection seems more likely, unless it was a zoo closure and the zookeepers got fired before it was wound down a zoo would most likely alert the government.

Maybe it's two blokes in a leopard costume.

Illegal exotic pets, more likely.

This is one of the most likely theories IMHO.

A lot of sightings started at the end of the 70s, which would align with the introduction of this law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Wild_Animals_Act_197...

Rumour has it that lots of wealthy people simply released their "pets" into the wild rather than confirming with the laws!

Fairly certain there were documented cases of servants confirming this too.

I wonder how many lynx there are in the countryside.

They’re not as charismatic, but they are native, and would be handy in regrowing native woodlands in Scotland.

Not as charismatic? Have you seen their absolute paws?

Are you quoting Monty Python?

Apparently I have chosen a very un-obvious piece of cover.

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