WAS I TOO CATTY OVER WIFE’S WILD PUMA CLAIMS?

IT WAS over 20 years ago that my wife claimed she saw it: a puma, that is. And we weren’t on safari. This beast was by the gate at our house in East Sussex. Or so she said.

I should add that our home abuts Dallington Forest, an ancient woodland, where such a creature could, at least in theory, live off the deer that certainly do inhabit it.

I did, nonetheless, dispute Rosa’s claim, and laughed when she described the animal she saw as ‘black and loping’. Some domestic cats can be pretty big, I told her, and do a certain amount of loping.

But when she insisted this was not an outsize tabby, I named it, sardonically, ‘The Puma of Dallington Forest’. From time to time, I would ask after it when Rosa returned from a walk, querying whether it had eaten any of our dogs whole, or just satisfied itself with a leg or two.

So it was with a certain amount of vindication that my wife last week drew my attention to a newspaper story headlined ‘British big cat theory bares its teeth’.

This was a report on findings by a team of scientists led by Dr Andrew Hemmings of the Royal Agricultural University, which had examined more than 100 skeletal remains of animals in British forests. On some of them it had found tooth-bite imprints ‘that could only be made by a nonnative cat the size of a leopard or puma’.

Said Dr Hemmings: ‘The others are more suggestive of small carnivores, but five certainly do fit the bill [for] puma or black leopard.’

As far as I know, the discoveries were not in our woods. But, for the time being, I will treat my wife’s puma sighting with less levity.