Big Cats in the UK
by Michael
(England)
There is always the occasional big cat sighting in the UK. A recent story concerns the killing of a young deer. It was killed by a large animal is seems and eaten. It happened in Wiltshire, England. The predator has been called the beast of Woodchester!
A person took a photo of a cat in a field and a newspaper has published it and asked if this is the beast.
I have taken the liberty of publishing the picture here for educational purposes!
I have marked up the picture with my thoughts. I think we have to try and scale things. It is so easy to get the size of animals wrong at a distance.
Anything we can use that helps to provide a scale puts a bit of accuracy into the process of deciding if the cat is a domestic cat or a wildcat. I am not saying that my scaling is necessarily accurate but it should be near the mark, I feel.
Many wildcats are a similar size to the domestic cat but it would have to be at least a medium sized wild cat at least to want to kill a deer and succeed. Small wildcat eat rodents etc.
Incidentally, newspaper journalists always refer to “big cats” in England. A big cat would have to be one of a lion, tiger, jaguar or leopard or perhaps a puma. These are obviously much larger than the cat in the picture above.
A large domestic cat would be about 12″ plus to the shoulder on my guess. The world’s largest is 17″ to the shoulder.
The cat in the picture is likely to be a large black domestic cat. The tail looks like a domestic cat tail and so does the general conformation of the body etc.
What do you think?
Michael
