OPINION: I believe that there is a link between the belief that big cats exist in the UK and religion. Both require faith and belief without evidence. Ultimately religion is based upon faith and the belief of a supernatural being, a god. And ultimately when people believe that there are wild large cats roaming around the British countryside it is only based on a belief and a faith that they exist because there is no hard evidence. There never is.
The mysterious black panther is a tangible manifestation of intangible, generalised fears.
Michael
The most noticeable aspect of big cats in the UK stories is that the photographs are always incredibly fuzzy. You can never tell whether you’re looking at a domestic cat or a leopard (usually black which is significant).
The sightings are nearly always of black panthers. This is because the black panther is more mysterious and considered more dangerous to people. This points to the underlying mentality of people who believe in big cats in the UK. It is based on fear. Fear of the unknown.
All people have an inherent fear of the unknown, the future. It’s getting worse because the future, to many, looks pretty bleak and worrisome.
I would expect big cat sightings in the UK to increase because of that. But people need to believe in a bogeyman, a mysterious cat that threatens them. This doesn’t just happen in the UK but all over the world. These mysterious cats are never actually identified. Evidence is never conclusively found.
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So, my theory is that the existence of big cats in the UK is based on fear. That’s where religion comes in.
Religion
There are many theories as to why religion exists. One of them is described by Karl Marx who described religion as the “opiate of the masses” or words to that effect. Religion calms people. It makes them feel better. Believe in a God and you feel less anxious because you hand over what happens next in your life to your God.
You don’t have to worry about what you have to do to avoid danger in the future. You feel that your life is in the hands of your personal God.
There are other theories for the existence of religion. Sigmund Freud viewed religion as a mass neurosis arising from deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses. There is a similarity there in Karl Marx’s theory. And it supports what I’ve just said.
EB Taylor and James Frazer proposed that religion essentially involves belief in spiritual beings. Belief in spiritual beings is not that dissimilar from belief in mystical, black panthers.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that people sometimes need to crystallise their fears about the future and what might happen in the form of a black panther in the countryside mysteriously threatening them.
Religion and a belief in a God assuages those fears. It calms the individual. That’s the link that I refer to in the title to this article.
If I’m correct, why should people with these fears create a mystical big cat? Why a cat? Why not a big dog? Probably because in the long distant past, people were genuinely in fear of big cats because they roamed around Europe as they do today around Africa. Lions were commonplace in Europe many thousands of years ago.
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