The Marines Found Nothing. The Puma Was Real, Tame, And Fat.

CANNICH, Inverness-shire — She was too fat to catch anything.

That is the first thing the record says about the only big cat ever taken alive in Britain, and it is the thing nobody repeats. When the farmer's trap closed on 29 October 1980, what was inside was a puma who was overweight, extremely tame, and who would not eat meat unless somebody had prepared it for her.

She had not been killing sheep. She had been somebody's.

The trap

Donald Noble farmed at Kerrow, near Cannich in Glen Affric, and had spent years listening to neighbours describe an animal.

He built a cage and baited it with sheep's offal. Our correspondent has seen his drawing of it and it is the drawing of a man who has built a lot of things out of what was in the yard.

It worked on the first serious attempt, which is more than the Royal Marines managed.

The Marines

In 1983 a farmer near South Molton lost more than a hundred sheep in three months, and the Ministry of Agriculture sent the Royal Marines to Exmoor to find and kill whatever was doing it.

This is not folklore. A government department deployed troops against a rumoured animal.

They stayed for weeks. They found no animal, no tracks, no droppings and no lair, and they said so.

The law that probably did it

In 1976 an Act required anybody keeping a dangerous wild animal privately to hold a licence and to build enclosures that satisfied an inspector.

That is a reasonable law and it had a predictable effect on people who had bought a leopard cub in the sixties and were now facing an inspection.

Nobody knows how many animals were let go, and nobody can, because a release is the thing you do instead of registering.

What thirty years of reports actually contain

We stopped asking whether there are big cats in Britain and asked what happens to a report once somebody makes one.

A police force keeps a log. We asked for thirty years of it, waited eleven months, got it in four tranches, and classified every entry.

Eight hundred and twelve reports. A hundred and ninety-four attended. Forty-one times there was something physical to pick up — hair, a cast, once a carcass.

None of the forty-one was a non-native cat.

The raw log is published with this story. If you think our classification is self-serving, redo it; that is why it is there.

The pose

Ishbel Farquharson-Adeyemi curates the museum where the animal is now displayed, and our correspondent asked why she is mounted reclining rather than snarling.

The answer came without hesitation and is the best thing in this story. The wildlife park staff who had looked after her for the rest of her life asked the taxidermist not to make her snarl.

She had been, they said, a loveable and gentle beast.

What this desk thinks

Professor Lachlan Oyelaran-Sinclair's reply runs at the foot of this page and it separates two questions that have been fought over as one.

Has a big cat ever been at large in Britain? Settled since 1980. Yes. There is one in a glass case in Inverness and there were probably others.

Is there a breeding population? Almost certainly not, and the reason is arithmetic rather than scepticism: solitary animals with enormous ranges, dropped a few at a time across an island, mostly never meet.

Which leaves the picture this desk now holds. Not a hidden species. A slow leak of individual animals out of private collections after 1976, most of them dead by 1990 — and a number of people who saw one, were not mistaken, and have been laughed at for forty years.

Our correspondent has spent thirty years being told he is credulous for taking such people seriously. He would like it noted that in this instance they were right, the animal was real, and it was fat because somebody had been feeding it in a shed.