Last week news outlets across the country were in a bit of a storm over a recently released photo from an Amazon documentary, which some believe is the "best evidence of big cats in the UK countryside."
Publications from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, and the Telegraph to the New Scientist all shared the story and photograph in question, which the makers of the documentary Panthera Britannia Declassified (available on Amazon Prime) claim to have discovered in the files of a zoology organisation. There is not a credit or name with the image, just a date of the 17th of March, with no year. It was allegedly taken in Smallthrone, Staffordshire.
The release of the photo comes just a few weeks after the Daily Star reported the shocking story of an angler who claims to have been woken in the night by a "cat the size of a labrador."
Fishing a night session on the River Severn at Hampton Loade, 48-year-old Chris Abbot claimed that after waking to the sound of his bite alarm, he went to reset his rods an hour later and a "big cat dashed past him just two feet away."
To add further support to his claim, his partner then allegedly found "prints in the mud" along the bank, however, there aren't any photos to support this.
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Chris isn't the first angler to claim to have bumped into big cats on the bank either. Back in May 2022, North Wales Live, The Daily Star and The Science Times reported the story of three anglers who whilst on a sea fishing trip at Gimblet Rock in Pwllheli, North Wales, encountered a very large cat "as big as a golden retriever", believed to be a puma.
In 2021, The Express reported the story and evidence supplied by Paul Johnson, who whilst fishing at Haresfield Fisheries in Gloucestershire, spotted a big cat walking the hedges about 300-yards away.
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To add further intrigue and potential validation to these stories, back in May this year BBC Wildlife Magazine and others reported more possible evidence. Following sheep attacks at a farm in Gloucestershire in 2022, a hair collected from the scene was lab analysed using mitochondrial DNA methods and confirmed to be a 99% match for the leopard species Panthera Pardus.
So, are there big cats wandering the UK countryside? And have anglers actually seen them? Our team remain divided and skeptical, but with anglers being the eyes and ears of our waterways, it may indeed be an angler that eventually provides the definitive proof to solve the mystery once and for all.
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