Wednesday, October 7, 2026
They Buried
We Dug It Up
⌕ Search
PX-2179
RELEASED UNDER FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
INVENTED FOR A FICTIONAL NEWSPAPER

Thirty years of one police force's wildlife-report log, 1996–2026, with the 1980 capture file

Origin
A British police force; a Highland council and wildlife park record series
Dated
log 1996–2026; capture file 1980–1986
Extent
log 604; capture file 22 pages
Status
accepted
Redactions
Reporting persons' names and addresses, by the force. Nothing by us.

Chain of custody

Requested by this newspaper in September 2025 and released in four tranches over eleven months, the last after a reminder. We paid GBP 310 in copying charges. The classification of each entry — logged, attended, material recovered, identified — is ours and not the force's, so the raw log is published in full alongside our coded version. Anybody who thinks our coding flatters our conclusion can recode it from the same file.

Held by: They Buried, document room; both versions mirrored publicly

Excerpt

Reports logged .......................................... 812
Attended by an officer .................................. 194
Physical material recovered ............................. 41
  of which identified as a non-native felid ............. 0

[From the 1980 capture file: the animal was in good condition but
overweight, tame to handling, and would not take unprepared meat. She was
not considered responsible for local livestock losses.]

Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.

Editor's note

Filed as the answer to a question nobody asks. The argument is always whether the animals are out there; this is what happens to a sighting after somebody rings it in, which is answerable and which nobody had asked for. The coding is ours and is published as ours, because a newspaper that classifies a dataset and then reports its own classification as a finding should hand over the dataset.

Cited in