Chasing Shadows: Britain’s Big Cat Mystery

Dir Mike Coggan, UK 2021 Available on YouTube

Chasing Shadows is a longer revisiting of themes touched on in the 10-minute Big Cats in Britain, which director Mike

Coggan admits began life as a “TV pitch” by his Grizzly Productions, “a video and animation company. We produce mostly commercial content. On the side we go and shoot our own sort of projects.”

It looks like a showreel at times. We’re get shots of the crew filming each other and showing off their shiny production kit. Gorgeous panoramic shots of a forest seem to be there to show what their drone can do.

The substance of their investigations? There’s detail on sightings by zoo people who know their big cats – two keepers at Exmoor Zoo who encountered pumas locally, and We Bought a Zoo’s Benjamin Mee, who had a sighting while returning to his Dartmoor Zoo. He thought one of his pumas had escaped until he found them all accounted for. Mee describes the behaviour of local livestock changing while big cats were loose – horses all gathered in the middle of their fields. He also notes sightings ceased after a particularly severe winter.

There’s commendable scaling work on “black leopard” drone footage, the “leopard’s” size calculated by measuring the known dimensions of the drone and the size of the shadow it would cast; based on this, the filmmakers feel the cat was “probably a domestic.” Joel did FOIA requests to all National Parks; only North York Moors reported any big cat activity. There’s a forensic look at footage of an alleged big cat kill of a Gloucestershire wild boar – from the US, puma expert Dr Mark Elbroch gives a detailed account of why he has suspicions. Although sceptical on British big cats, Elbroch admits that “people don’t find dead pumas,” as they choose sheltered places to die.

Dorset big cat expert McGowan talks us through his convincing photos of deer kills in the New Forest and a roadside “lion” corpse. Merrily Harpur’s “daimon” theory gets the briefest of look-ins. Sir Benjamin Slade’s account of a black leopard on his estate seems to be an excuse to film him handling guns from his extensive collection.

But extraordinary claims require less maddeningly vague treatment. Coggan, who’s seen a British black leopard himself, concludes that most believers have had an encounter of their own but that “our search for big cats” is “fruitless”. He adds that the subject is “nice to dip your toe in it.” If it’s a quick toe-dip into a complex phenomenon you’re after, then this is for you. Matt Salusbury

★★ ★★★