Cats, dogs and bears

With respect to the “black dogequals-big-black cat” proposal [FT396:50]: I was recently looking through some old newspapers online and came across a report in The Evening Telegraph (18 Nov 1929), of a “black bear with red eyes and a dog’s bark” roaming the woods near Buckenham Tofts, now part of the Army’s Stanford Training Area in Norfolk. According to the report, the creature looked “over a hedge at two sober men driving horses”, chased “two other men, equally sober, across a ploughed field” as well as “fighting, defeating, and eating one sober tabby cat” (my italics).

The local police searched the woods after the first sighting, which “apparently” took place in broad daylight about noon. They found no trace of the Buckenham Beast; but after the police investigation, the beast chased two men “across a ploughed field at midnight”. The men were “positive that [the beast] was a bear… because, although it growled like a dog, it was larger than any known breed of dog”. The paper notes that folklorists considered the Buckenham Beast to be the infamous Black Shuck: a phantom dog long held to roam East Anglia.

As there was more than one sighting, it’s difficult to dismiss the ‘Buckenham bear’ as a tall tale. A more prosaic explanation could be, if not a big cat, a large, feral dog: “Black dog-equalsbig-black bear”. In Feral, George Monbiot cites a comment by FT’s David Hambling in the Skeptic that “people often imagine that the creatures they see are very much bigger than they are”. So, the men walking over the field at midnight may have overestimated the beast’s size. Black animals may be particularly difficult to accurately size visually. And it was night. But presumably the hedge would give an indication of scale (and perhaps reveal if it was a dog, cat or bear) as the ‘Buckenham Beast’ peered at the men driving horses.

Monbiot speculates that we may have a mental template that evolved to allow us to recognise sabre-toothed and other big cats “once our ancestors’ foremost predators… before the conscious mind can process and interpret the image”. He suggests this may account for Alien Big Cat (ABC) reports: we instinctively interpret ambiguous phenomena as feline. If we get it wrong, it hardly matters. If we’re right, the rapid interpretation could save our life.

I wonder if the same applies

to bears. In Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, Stephen Herrero notes that, apart from humans, the “grizzly bear and the polar bear are the most dangerous wild land mammals in North America.” Just as our ancestors faced massive sabretooth cats, we faced mega-bears. The extinct short-faced bear Pararctotherium pamparum ,for instance, was up to three times larger than the record for the most massive polar bear ( R MacPhee, End of the Megafauna). So, if we have a cat template, why not one for bears?

Perhaps because ABCs are part of our culture, regularly covered in newspapers and online, our subconscious template means we interpret an ambiguous phenomenon as feline. But could the same phenomenon evoke a bear, if we evolved that template? It’s curious, at least to me, that the sober men saw a bear, rather than a hound, big cat or even Black Shuck. I doubt, however, if any single explanation will account for such a complex phenomenon as out-of-place fauna.

Mark Greener By email