Big cats, stuffed toys and some very red-faced officers...
IN the still gloom of the cattle shed the outline of the big cat was unmistakeable. The pregnant cows shifted nervously as Bruce Grubb strained for a better view of the predator in their midst.
Then, when he was absolutely certain he was not imagining things, the young farmer called the police. Community officers and a firearms team were dispatched within minutes.
Contact was made with the nearest wildlife parks to check if they had any escapees. There appeared to be none.
Gingerly, the officers got out of their vehicles and approached the cattle shed in Hatton, Aberdeenshire, half expecting the beast to make a bolt for it. This one just stood there, bold as brass.
In fact, even when Mr Grubb inched towards the beast in his truck as the police watched, barely daring to breathe, it stood its ground.
It was a cuddly toy tiger, left as a prank.
Call-outs such as this to reports of big cat sightings are more frequent than many imagine. In hotspots such as Aberdeenshire, where this drama unfolded over 45 tense minutes in February, there can be ten a year. Most do not end with such a prosaic explanation.
Fife, home of the now legendary Beast of Balbirnie, is equally well known for the spooked phone calls to the police from members of the public sounding like they have seen a ghost.
What they tell police they have seen is usually black, large and feline. Certainly not a dog – much too big to be a fox.
THE third of the nation’s big cat hotspots is Ayrshire. The area around the villages of Drongan and Coalhall, where the latest sighting was made yesterday, is practically the epicentre.
In 2009, just two miles away from there in a field outside Coylton, a pregnant thoroughbred racehorse was left with serious injuries after an attack by what a vet concluded was a large beast with razor sharp claws.
Both this horse and another one in the field appeared to be deeply traumatised even though the second horse was not injured. This left the vet and the racehorse owner convinced a large wild animal had terrorised them.
‘The wounds actually look like Stanley knife marks but there’s no way anyone could have done that with a knife because the horse would move,’ said breeder Jimmy Horne at the time.
That year, a ‘big cat’ was seen prowling in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, while a sandy coloured cat said to resemble a puma had been reported in the grounds of Sundrum Castle, very close to the scene of the horse attack. But many believed the more likely culprit was a large black leopard-like cat photographed outside an abandoned hospital in Irvine, 15 miles away. So what was the truth? Frustratingly, no one really knows. Indeed, the vast majority of big cat sightings in Scotland over the past two decades remain impossible to pin down conclusively, which has led to two main schools of thought.
The first is that Scotland is home to several dozen leopards and possibly a few pumas too. They almost certainly escaped – or were deliberately freed from private collections – and they roam the countryside, keeping out of people’s way and feeding largely on farm animals.
That would certainly account for all the sightings and blurry photographs – some of them quite persuasive – and explain why the carcases of sheep have sometimes been found up trees.
The school of thought favoured by the scientific community, however, is there is not a single big cat in the wild in Scotland.
If there were, ask experts at Edinburgh Zoo, why have their remains never been discovered? Why do witness reports vary so wildly and why, in an age when almost everyone has a camera phone, are decent pictures of the beasts so hard to come by?
Officially, cats the size of leopards are supposed to have been extinct in Britain since the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago. But one theory is the rather more recent 1976 Dangerous Wild Ani-
mals Act prompted a revival. The law made it illegal to keep big cats privately and, so the theory goes, the private collectors gave the animals their freedom.
But none of these could be alive today, so there must be new generations. How do they find a mate? Is the suggestion that families of leopards and pumas are thriving unseen in forests?
Not that incontrovertible evidence is entirely absent. In 1980, Ted Noble from Cannich, Inverness-shire caught a puma on his land. ‘Felicity’ later became a tourist attraction at Highland Wildlife Park in Kingussie.
That certainly explained the string of sightings in the area. The only problem was they continued after Felicity’s capture. In Fife, meanwhile, the Beast of Balbirnie was christened in 2005 after a pawprint measuring 4in by 3.5in was discovered near Markinch.
There were so many ‘sightings’ in the ensuing months that Balbirnie Park started to sound more like the plains of the Serengeti than an expanse of grassland and tree-lined paths favoured by dogwalkers and joggers.
By January the following year, even the police were on board with the idea of a Balbirnie Beast, warning there was at least one big cat, probably black and almost certainly a leopard. ‘We have a duty to protect the public,’ announced PC Mark Maylin. ‘The next step is to try to find and capture the animal.’ They never did.
Indeed, within days, the credibility of his statement appeared to falter as Iain Valentine, then head of animals at Edinburgh Zoo, revealed the print was not that of a cat but a large dog.
No sooner had he spoken than it emerged a lolloping St Bernard called Bernard had holidayed in Fife with his owner from Berkshire and had rooted around in the very spot where the print was found.
How the locals laughed – until PC Maylin took a series of casts of the print, drove to Hertfordshire and presented them to Rob Martin of the Big Cat Survival Trust. ‘It took about two seconds to decide,’ said Mr Martin at the time. ‘No way was it a dog’.
The print, he assured the policeman, was left by a big cat.
That brought some comfort to credible eyewitnesses such as Susan McNab who reported seeing a black beast while walking a border collie in Glenrothes.
SHE said: ‘I’ve just come back from safari in Tanzania and saw many big cats there and they looked exactly the same.’ North of Aberdeen, meanwhile, the Beast of Buchan has supposedly been prowling around for more than 20 years.
In 2008, there were three sightings in a single August weekend.
‘I couldn’t believe what I saw,’ said Fiona Clark as she described a ‘jet black’ creature walking along a dyke near Fraserburgh. ‘My feet were stuck to the ground. It was huge. It had a lot of strength in its front feet and down its chest, and a very strong head.’
She added: ‘I’m lucky it wasn’t hungry.’ Her daughter Lynne claimed she saw the same creature near the old kirkyard at Tyrie hours earlier and there was another big cat report at nearby Peathill the previous day.
Mrs Clark said: ‘It’s important that farmers know this is going about. They will have to be extra vigilant to protect their livestock.’
Some ten years later in Hatton, Aberdeenshire, it was Bruce Grubb’s livestock which worried him most. If the big cat in the cattle shed pounced on the animals inside it would be a bloodbath.
In the event, the incident ended in gales of laughter. And police took the stuffed toy back to the station as a mascot. j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk