Think big cat sightings are a myth? Meet the expert who says hundreds roam across Scotland …and read the science that backs him up

Settling down to enjoy her lunch, pensioner Annie Mitchell gazed out absent-mindedly at a bird box in the garden when a large black shadow caught her eye.

Convinced she had seen a strange cat ‘larger than a labrador’ roaming on old tennis courts beyond her home in Kirriemuir, Angus, the 71-year-old braved the February chill to take a closer look. 

‘My first thought was “look at the size of that cat – what a long tail” and how big it was,’ she recalled.

‘I felt it was bigger than any cat I have seen. I went outside to get a closer look and was only a car length away. It looked big. 

I thought it was longer than a labrador dog but not as high. I have not seen a cat that big before.

Sightings of big cats like this panther, and evidence of livestock kills, have been widely reported

Andy McLachlan with the remains of savaged sheep found stripped to the bone near Bettyhill in Sutherland

‘It certainly was not a dog. Its movement was low and prowling. It was looking for mice maybe, in the field.’

Mrs Mitchell had the presence of mind to film the cat, albeit shakily and from a distance, as did Gordon Welsh, who captured the astonishing moment in November when he spotted a black creature at least the size of a greyhound skulking in a field near the village of Blackdog, six miles from Aberdeen.

‘I was just walking at the time and saw it limping – that’s what caught my eye,’ the 50-year-old said. ‘I was like, “the hell is that?” but then I was like, “it’s not a cat, it’s too big’’.’

Mr Welsh, a ghillie, deerstalker and farmhand, said: ‘From the way it was moving, the tail size and that, it was slightly like a panther but it could be a crossbreed. I’ve seen them plenty of times. 

I’ve seen lynx, I’ve seen panthers, I’ve seen crossbreeds – they’re all over the place.’

As credible eye-witnesses, there is not a jury in the land who would doubt their testimony. 

Without definitive forensic or photographic evidence, however, such close encounters of the furred kind must be filed along with the thousands of other unsubstantiated reports down the decades that suggest alien species stalk the Scottish countryside.

And yet, those reports continue almost daily. In recent years, one spooked resident captured eerie CCTV footage of a ‘puma’ in her garden in Lanarkshire, while a shocked dog walker in Perthshire was certain he disturbed a ‘big cat’ roaming in a field near his Perthshire home.

In July last year, panic gripped the villagers in Brydekirk, Dumfriesshire, amid talk of a cat the size of a labrador prowling the fields nearby.

Beyond the talk, there was nothing tangible for the experts to get their teeth into until, earlier this month, some remarkable proof came to light just over the Border in Cumbria, thanks to the bloodied remains of a recently savaged sheep and a quick-thinking local.

The sheep was discovered by Sharon Larkin-Snowden early one morning in October after she disturbed whatever had been eating the carcass. ‘I saw something black, running, and I assumed at first it was a sheepdog,’ she said.

‘Then I did a double take and realised it was a black cat. It ran towards a stone wall, stopped and then jumped the wall. It was big – the size of a German shepherd dog.’

Something made her take a swab of the carcass, which found its way to Professor Robin Allaby, a biologist at the University of Warwick with an interest in big cat research. 

He analysed the sample and discovered ‘Panthera genus’ DNA, which can only have come from a lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar or snow leopard.

He said a leopard was the most likely match on British soil and declared the finding as the first scientific proof that non-native big cats do, indeed, roam the UK.

Presenting his findings this month, Professor Allaby told BBC Wildlife that it was very hard to lift DNA from swabs taken from carcasses but there was no doubt in this case.

‘It makes me a convert [to the existence of non-native big cats in the UK],’ he said. ‘On the balance of probabilities, I think this is a genuine hit.’

The astonishing breakthrough has reignited the eternal question – if there are big cats prowling the Lake District, is it too much of a leap to suppose big cats are living wild in Scotland too?

Certainly Paul Macdonald, who has been steadily mapping all reported big cat sightings in Scotland for more than five years, takes no convincing. ‘It’s very exciting – another dot to join in the bigger picture,’ he said.

‘We will never entirely know how many big cats are out there,’ he added, ‘but what we can confidently say from our current mapping is that there are dozens and possibly into the hundreds of these big cats wild in the countryside. Perhaps as many as 400.’

That’s a lot of big cats, especially as, officially, they do not exist in the wild. 

But Mr Macdonald, head of the Scottish Big Cat Research Team, runs the largest mapping database of its kind in the UK and has pinpointed around 1,500 ‘credible’ sightings from John o’Groats to Berwick-upon-Tweed, from Tobermory in the west to the East Coast, and right across the Central Belt.

Reproduced in the Mail as a jaw-dropping ‘heat map’ of big cat activity, they build a picture that seems hard to dispute, yet Mr Macdonald says even this dizzying number represents no more than 1 to 5 per cent of all Scottish sightings.

Many more are never shared. Often people convince themselves they’re mistaken or don’t want to risk being ridiculed. 

While some do flag up their suspicions, only sightings which Mr Macdonald and his team of field workers, who double-check every one, are convinced are accurate are recorded.

‘In Scotland, what we are seeing over 75 years of activity and sightings is three main species types consistently reported during that time,’ he said. 

The vast majority are of black cats, most probably leopards, with the rest a likely mix of puma and lynx – both not strictly big cats, but still of huge interest to ecologists, not least because of recent calls to reintroduce the once-native lynx thought to have been hunted to extinction. 

‘Our findings have the potential to rewrite the question of reintroduction, if lynx are already here,’ said Mr Macdonald.

Many of the sightings are close to areas of population and the country’s roads network, places where people have eyes on the countryside while walking their dog or driving their car.

‘Less than 2 per cent of Scotland’s land mass is urbanised and every town and city is surrounded by green spaces, so most of our land is an ideal habitat for cats living out. Many of the sightings by car are at night when these nocturnal animals are out hunting,’ said Mr Macdonald.

‘Habitat certainly pops out of the map. We are seeing the same habitats of dense forest and vegetation frequented by leopards here as they would in their naturalised homes in South Africa, for example. 

They are very adaptable and can operate in a variety of different habitats, but they stick to areas which provide decent cover, mostly in concentrations of forest and by watercourses which provide an abundance of prey and a source of water.

‘Largely, the lynx sightings are coming from areas of deep forest and they are known as a deep forest cat in Siberia and areas of Europe where they exist as well.’

The gaps in his map mirror the country’s most remote areas where there’s minimal footfall, which doesn’t mean there aren’t cats there, just that nobody is around to see them.

‘The lack of humans probably makes it a more useful environment for the cats too,’ he added.

Mr Macdonald has been convinced that big cats roam the land since he clapped eyes on one while catching the train to school. 

‘It was at Glenfinnan on the train to Lochaber High School where a friend and I saw it very clearly in the morning sunlight, just a short distance from the train.

‘It was a kind of chocolatey brown and was just slinking away and the two of us couldn’t speak for some moments afterwards. 

We were certain about exactly what we had seen. I think I had maybe seen a big cat on TV documentaries, but there was no mistaking.

‘It was absolutely adult leopard size. It’s more the shock of seeing it in the wild – that’s a creature that shouldn’t be here, so what is it doing here? 

How has it got here? Is there only one or is it part of a family? All these questions suddenly start to flood your mind.

‘The overwhelming emotion was being absolutely awestruck. Many witnesses get quite emotional because these are some of the most graceful and beautiful creatures – they move almost like water.’

The dates fit roughly with a huge uptick in the late 1970s following the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, which meant licences had to be sought from local authorities to keep anything other than a regular domestic pet. 

The new restrictions meant many owners of big cats deciding that instead of giving their beloved animals to a zoo or a wildlife park, they would prefer to release them.

Prior to that, big cats were very popular as fashionable status symbols with models and celebrities, such as the singer Tom Jones, pictured taking these exotic pets for a walk. 

Before the Act, there were pet shops in Edinburgh and Glasgow where you could walk in and buy a leopard or two,’ said Mr Macdonald. 

‘One witness I spoke to a couple of years ago said they remembered a lady walking her two pet leopards down Princes Street Gardens in the late 1960s.

‘They became fashionable if you had the disposable income and wanted to be seen as not just wearing a leopard skin coat but walking a live one. 

It was a status symbol and it was affordable and they were available.’

Regulation cut both affordability and availability and prompted owners to set their pets free – rather than have them put down – in the hope they could make a life in the wild.

Such was the case with Felicity the puma, who was captured by a farmer near Loch Ness after years of sightings of big cats near his farm at Cannich, Invernessshire.

On closer inspection, experts felt Felicity had been roaming free for less than 48 hours. 

She was obese, tame and did not appear to be frightened of humans and lived out her days comfortably at the Highland Wildlife Park.

It seemed clear she had been raised as a pet – which only raised more questions about what feral animal had been stalking the farmer’s fields for all those years? Another released pet?

Not all wild cats that made a home in Scotland were abandoned, however. Motorists stopping at Tom Gillespie’s garage forecourt in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in the late 70s were confronted by an unusual guard dog – a docile lion called Leo.

Mr Gillespie, who loved big cats, told a newspaper: ‘I had always wanted a lion, so a friend of mine who is a director of the safari park told me he had one for me with the right temperament. 

I have had him since he was nine weeks old, and he stays in the trailer which is parked beside a service station I used to run.’

Leo became a big attraction at the petrol station and only once got into trouble, when he was accused of biting a motorist on the bottom, landing Gillespie in court. Gillespie was eventually cleared of allowing his pet to run loose, stating outside court: ‘He’s just a big soft pet.’

Despite the sheer volume of sightings, Mr Macdonald dismisses fears about cats attacking humans as ‘fearmongering’, adding: ‘It is in the nature of these cats to avoid human contact and conflict.’

For sheep, it may be a different matter as last year, documentary researchers obtained 86 pages of correspondence and pictures under freedom of information laws from Police Scotland, the Scottish Government and its wildlife agency, NatureScot, about spates of livestock killings where sheep carcasses were stripped of meat in a way which did not resemble fox or bird attacks.

Mr Macdonald said big cats were at risk themselves as farmers and gamekeepers have made it known they were prepared to shoot them on sight to protect livestock.

Except, according to Nature-Scot, that can’t happen because the cats aren’t there. 

A spokesman insisted: ‘While we receive occasional reports of big cats, none submitted in recent years have provided sufficient evidence to conclude that they are present.’

Officially, then, big cats remain just shadows lurking in the wild.

But as more eyes seek them out, the red glow of the heat map becomes harder to ignore.