--- title: "The Marines Found Nothing. The Puma Was Real, Tame, And Fat." dek: "In 1983 the Ministry of Agriculture sent Royal Marines to Exmoor to kill a beast. They found no tracks and no lairs. Three years earlier a farmer in Glen Affric had already caught one, in a cage baited with offal." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: Cryptids author: Sal Brindisi (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T18:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/marines-found-nothing tags: big cats, 1980, Dangerous Wild Animals Act, Exmoor, taxidermy genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Marines Found Nothing. The Puma Was Real, Tame, And Fat. *In 1983 the Ministry of Agriculture sent Royal Marines to Exmoor to kill a beast. They found no tracks and no lairs. Three years earlier a farmer in Glen Affric had already caught one, in a cage baited with offal.* 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. > **Figure:** Thirty years of a police force's wildlife log, sorted — see https://theyburied.com/article/marines-found-nothing ## 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. > They saw something. They were not wrong. And the thing they saw was somebody's abandoned pet. > > — Prof. Lachlan Oyelaran-Sinclair ## 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. ## Sources (invented) - A police force's wildlife-report log, 1996–2026, Obtained under freedom of information — Requested; released in four tranches over eleven months; classified by this newspaper and published in full (2025–2026) - The 1980 capture file, Council and wildlife park records, and contemporary press — Read; the trap's dimensions come from the farmer's own drawing (2026) - Ishbel Farquharson-Adeyemi, Curator, the museum where the animal is displayed — Interviewed in the gallery, beside the case (May 2026) - Prof. Lachlan Oyelaran-Sinclair, Wildlife biologist; works on non-native carnivore establishment — Interviewed by video call twice (June 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2179: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2179 ## What we could not confirm - Whether any non-native cat is alive in Britain now. Our log covers one force area and stops at the county line. Absence in one file is not absence in a country, and this desk has said so on every story it has ever filed. - How many were released after 1976. It is widely believed some were. Believed is the right word: no register of releases exists, because a release is the thing you do instead of registering. - What killed the Exmoor sheep. Something did, over a hundred of them, and the Marines did not establish what. A dog is the likeliest answer and likeliest is not an answer. ## Right of reply **Prof. Lachlan Oyelaran-Sinclair, wildlife biologist** (Asked to reply because he thinks both sides of this argument are answering the wrong question. Printed unedited.): > The question people fight about is whether a big cat has ever been at large in Britain. That question is settled and has been since 1980. Yes. One was in a cage in Inverness-shire and is now in a glass case, and there were probably others. > > The question that matters is whether there is a breeding population, and that is a different thing entirely, and the answer is almost certainly no. > > Here is why, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion. A population needs animals finding each other. Pumas and leopards are solitary and hold enormous ranges. Drop a dozen across an island the size of Britain across a decade and they will mostly never meet. The ones that do may not be a pair. The ones that are a pair may not raise a litter to independence in a landscape with no large prey and a great many roads. > > So the honest picture is not a hidden species. It is a slow leak of individual animals out of private collections in the seventies, most of them dead by 1990, some of them seen by people who were not mistaken and who have been treated as fools for forty years. > > That last group is who I would write for. They saw something. They were not wrong. And the thing they saw was somebody's abandoned pet, which is a sadder story than a monster and harder to sell. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.