Chasing Shadows: Britain's Big Cat Mystery | Full Documentary

it had been raining but it was quite a bright moon at night i was sitting in front of my fishing baby on a chair looking at the car window we went past these two corn fields i was coming down country roads i've just seen two what look like eyes looking at me so i slowed right down and that's when i saw it and suddenly this large black cat appeared and i just sat there looking straight at it and it looked straight back at me as well i saw a very large black cat like a leopard and then looked back to see this it was like something you see in the zoo i mean it was a big black hat nothing else it could be it was probably only at this point about five feet or so in front of my car i didn't feel any sense of danger whatsoever it clearly didn't feel threatened by my presence i spoke to a lady on phone she actually said we've had a lot of sightings in that area an awful lot of sightings okay here we go one take one so in 2019 we made a documentary called big cats of britain which explored the bizarre phenomenon of big cats items in the uk i remember seeing a leopard 15 16 years ago the response showed a clearly divided opinion between those who basically thought it was all crap and those who had actually had sightings themselves so we're revisiting this subject and making a new documentary ow [Music] what we hope to do is collect more evidence talk to specialists we all simultaneously swore and said the word puma speak to more witnesses a great big [ __ ] in the early hours of the morning and conducting some of our own field research using camera traps and thermal drones [Music] [Music] benjamin me is the owner of dartmouth zoo this guy came from france speaks french he's a good boy he will kill you the same but he he'll come out and roll around first his book we bought a zoo was adapted into a major hollywood movie and mentions the peculiar sighting benjamin had himself of a big cat in your book you discuss seeing a a puma um can you just run me through that experience yeah i brought my brother duncan back from the station at midnight with his business partner as we're coming through the very narrow lanes we sort of steep devon walls on either side i saw this animal here across the road just saw the chest and head and first glance if it was a deer i stopped to wait and that gave us the chance to have a second look it kind of transformed from this template i had in my mind of a deer into this tumor like this like muscles big bulgy jaws and it just looked cross at us like this and i just thought someone's let the puma out now that's really bad and we all simultaneously swore and said the word puma and then it just kind of like retreated back into the woods so we came piling back up here got the torches shone it on the puma enclosure because we had two puma here at the time both pumas were in and both pumas were exactly the same animal that we'd just seen but smaller the females quite clearly for several seconds however and and all the farmers around um will tell you quietly off the record oh yeah puma around yeah and ellis had the place there were always cats out and uh when we had our lynx escape 10 uh on our 10th anniversary it's only a little cat but the local livestock behave in exactly the same way they can smell it in a mile off and this is one of the things that one of my neighbors said is all her horses gathered in one place in the middle of the field just like the old days she said when the puma was around like really and she said don't worry it makes it easier to pick up all the poo because it's all in one place they're really good about it it's like oh more cats whatever but my theory if you want to hear is that uh in 2010 the sightings seemed to have dried up and 2010 i believe was the coldest winter in many many years it went down to minus 18 here and from that year on there were no more sightings that i know about [Music] benjamin's interview gave us much to think about despite having heard about many sightings beyond 2010 benjamin's opinion on the matter seems logical and robust we're on our way to see merrily harper she's got a bit more of a supernatural vibe going with the big cat sightings which i think is a bit of a testament as to how sort of shrouded in mystery this whole subject is [Music] you know on the one hand you have this absolutely wonderful first-hand accounts of seeing these big cats from multiple people on the other hand there is hardly any physical evidence to speak of i mean you could say none really part of the problem actually is that so many black panther like creatures are seen i don't think i've had a single report of a spotted leopard but a spotted leopard is the common type of leopard a black leopard is rare i think that these big cats in britain exist as diamonds which have one foot on each side of that divide between the supernatural as one might call it and the natural and i sort of feel that perhaps you know these big cats appear to us as a sort of portal really as a way of changing our perspectives [Music] you you can't rule anything out really can you i just think that it think things get so improbable that uh you sort of have to discount them you might hold out for a long time believing that you can get a film of one of these big cats and you know let's talk in five years time to see if you think differently [Music] it was fascinating to speak to someone who had spent such a lot of time researching this mystery but we were determined to find an explanation that wasn't supernatural [Music] if these creatures really are prowling the countryside what theories offer an explanation to this bizarre phenomenon here are the key concepts at a glance the escapee theory over the last 200 years big cats among other exotic animals have been kept in private collections and travelling circuses considering how agile these big cats are it doesn't seem too wild to suggest that some may have escaped over the years however the few cases that have been recorded have resulted in the animal being captured or killed one puma felicity was captured in scotland and her origin was never found could this be one of britain's wildcats the indigenous theory have these animals been hiding out in the uk all along in order for this theory to be true big cats would have to have lived here undocumented for almost half a million years right back to when the english channel was formed i mean surely there would have been like loads of bodies the next theory is the release theory similar to the escapee theory this suggests that the big cats that were privately owned had been purposefully released into the wild following the introduction of the 1976 dangerous wild animals act this act insisted that in order to own a dangerous wild animal you would need a license a license that could only be obtained by those with enclosures with the correct size ventilation temperature and so on you could say this made it impractical and expensive to keep a large carnivore as a beloved pet why not let one loose down the local park it wasn't actually illegal at the time to release these animals into the wild the cover-up theory if you're a fan of conspiracy theories this may wet your appetite the cover-up is the idea that big cats are out there and solid evidence has been captured and even bodies recovered but this is all hidden away by a government who doesn't want to cause panic or pay any compensation to lost livestock and last but not least are they there at all could the hundreds of sightings year after year up and down the country just be misidentifications false memories or constructed fantasies we've heard the claims but what tangible evidence is there to back them up last winter i was working in the yard and the sheep had been disturbed they they'd sort of split up lambs had broken through a bit of a gate that i'd put up which was unusual because they were pretty quiet and the rest of them were bunched up like they've been herded like they've been attacked they they they were probably worried up they wouldn't come out of there it was quite a job to get them out but then the following morning as i was walking down i could see the sheep run from one field to the other and i sort of thought to myself well whatever was there last night was about again [Music] i was expecting to see a dog or or something in there you know pestering those sheep as i went into the field it was it was bleeding there was one sheep dead out in the field and you could see that sheep had been killed exactly where it slept where it spent the night like all round it was with patches in the frost where the other sheep had been lying and there was blood sort of all down the front end of the sheep you you could see it hadn't got up it hadn't really struggled from what i could see there was no real marks on the ground all it had was these puncture marks in the throat and and well the blood hadn't even congealed the blood was still warm i could put my little finger right into the into the bite marks in the throat all the punching wounds in the throat the only other wall that was disturbed was right up on its back and when i took the wool from there there was puncture marks there that i'd i'd say corresponded to that sheep being held by the throat obviously being throttled and being held down by i'd say a big cat's claws so this one was taken in somerset in the quantock hills prowling through the bushes these three photos were taken on a camera trap this is definitely a black animal it's quite big it's an odd time it's almost half eleven okay so the next one yeah the relative size to like sort of the lamppost suggests it's quite small uh this is a video it's about the same size of a deer that's got a long tail and it's got a pretty slinky movement humors are such big chunky bodies you know i think this is too lanky to be a puma so this one divided a lot of opinion online uh does your neighbor slap that cat [Music] [Music] there's no nearby objects here to gauge the scale but we can see the drone shadow so if we can figure out the size of jesus we can figure out the size of the drone we can compare the size of the drone shadow to the animal after speaking with dave from dave's fpv we now know his drone model and this is 210 millimeters across the sun was quite high in the sky when this was shot so the actual size of the drone shouldn't be too dissimilar from the shadow size of the drone so by laying these lines down in 3d space we can roughly see how big the drone size is compared to the animal so from our measurements it looks like the cat in the video is around 60 centimeters in length if we compare it to this domestic cat she is about 55 centimetres in length it looks like it's a domestic i became interested in the big phenomenon in 1984 i was watching badgers on a nice september evening and i saw a puma come along stalking one of the badger cubs and i couldn't believe it i hadn't had any idea or an inkling that there were large cats living wild in the uk but when i saw the same puma again it was a female and she had cubs in a quarry nearby and i watched them quite closely and that's what really triggered my interest to start investigating it a bit more [Music] i have pictures of all kinds of things from footprints to deer kills in this particular instance i saw the body of a seeker deer that was hidden underneath a fallen tree every ounce of flesh has been licked from its bones its ribs have been bitten right down to the base as the animal has gone in to eat the organs which they often do the skin has all been licked up over the face and you can actually see how the rasping tongue of a cat has licked it up bit like a lollipop and this is all very typical ways in which big cats feed this is another example this is a fallow buck that was taken near believe in the new forest and on this particular animal a lot of the haunt has been taken and again the nose has been damaged it's interesting because this animal was a deformed animal and these are the animals far more likely to be taken by big cats the disease the weak the old and this fallow buck had only one antler and it was also very small so it was very vulnerable to cat attack and that's what's happened missed an example of a fox that was killed by a leopard in one of my study areas and as you can see the animal has basically been halved and almost turned inside out this is very typical feeding strategy of both leopards and pumas you can see by its tongue hanging out and its bulging eyes that it died of asphyxiation and again it has the same trauma on the muzzle where an animal had clamped it over the nose to suffocate it and in this case again it's been halved you can see the ribs have been sheared down by strong carnassial teeth in a typical way in which you would expect a big cat to eat a deer like this so one day i was out and i had somebody else in the car at the time and we stopped and we said crikey what on earth is that about a huge dinner what must be a dog so we stopped the car in front of it and as soon as we did there's a horde of cyclists that come along and they're all shouting cool look there's a deadline and they all stopped in front of it it was about nine feet in length his tail was four foot long and really thin it had a huge torso and its head looks very cat-like it's t-flute cac-like but rather small in relation to a leopard or something this line here is actually a military line and it's actually 17 centimeters wide so that should give you an idea of just how large the animal was i photographed it and then i decided to come back after a meeting and pick it up but of course when i came back from a meeting two hours later the body was not there and there's a line of tanks in the road and a digger so i thought right they've obviously removed that body as quickly as possible so no evidence on that one i'm afraid apart from the photograph so how we gonna go about looking for these animals basically what we do know is that we've got sightings that up and down the country like there's no part of the mainland uk that there's no activity [Music] in i've been looking at the facebook groups there are a few places where sightings have popped up where they've been quite prolific so i can make a list of all the sightings and target those areas for our operations [Music] so you know dan our associate producer he lives by a disused quarry he's going to go down there with a few traps and lay out some cameras and see what he can get so which is undisclosed [Music] so i think we should probably pick areas which have high activity but are also like really rural where we can go and put loads of meat out and hopefully that will actually be an incentive for something to actually come to the camera trap we also have some of this predator p um so this is essentially a mountain lion urine um i have no idea how they get hold of this this is a thermal drone so it has on a 4k camera as well as a thermal camera it's all going to essentially be a bit of a stab in the dark we've just got to be in the right place at the right time [Music] so if we take bruce's cage this will be a steak hang that up on there [Music] the big slab of meat our biggest bit was kind of on the top of that branch [Music] we can at least try and cover basically the one way in and out of this peninsula hopefully over a couple of days they'll generate a nice bit of smell [Music] [Applause] where is that where'd you pick that up from the americans use these for um shooting terrorists so we've got cartridges um that you put in which are a bb cartridges and you know they've got nine bullets in it and my brother used to use these in the malayan jungle and they'll break any bone in a man's body before you had your encounter was there any kind of big cat activity or strange activity going on yes it was very odd we in the beginning we before he we actually got sight of him we did lose three big rams which were all found dead in a haha totally stripped and i got there and they were still warm and the guts had gone everything had gone except for the head and all the ribs were sticking out the power that had crunched up these bones and things you know there was something out there with a big draw then we lost a lot of geese a lot of poultry we've got lots of foxes around here but they they never behave like that they're taking the odd chicken uh difficulty with the geese because the gays have put up a pretty good fight and so just run me through your sighting then well it was a summer in the middle of the wedding season we do lots of weddings it was wandering around down by the lakes you see them in the early hours of the morning and things like that when you're out stalking the photograph was taken and then everybody came and investigated and the photograph the shadow everything lined up the absolute proportion that it wasn't a puma it was a panther because it was bigger so it's a it's a big beast was this something that was presenting any kind of threat or danger well yeah i thought that oh goodness me we've got all these weddings and parties going along and we had somebody wandering out there drunk in the middle of the night you know or somebody's mother-in-law it might eat them so we told the police and they went away to do a risk assessment they don't want to come out here with some ferocious beast out there because they're probably not very good shots anyway and it might eat them alive so they were gone you know looked at our armory and to make guests saw the right sort of weapons you know plenty of choice yeah plenty of choice they only got 82 guns in the bar yeah we had to put up signs and we said you know beware of the panther or the beast or whatever it was the police said that they somebody had felt threatened and it's actually well documented baronet's gun a stunt backfire police swoop i had a raid in the middle of a wedding they always do it in the middle of a wedding or when you're filming i'm surprised i'm turned up today 18 armed police were sticking guns in my face heckler and kosh they were it's the fourth raid they've done i mean one time they turned up with helicopters olay what you doing in there the sighting was down by the lakes down there nothing in here that it could have been mixed up with no no no no there's nothing around it and what was it doing a great big a great big [ __ ] in the early hours of the morning it was big because you can tell because there was guards around those trees and you can we measured the height of the guard look at that look at the thing and it was across there and you tell it is a big it's a big cat it's not somebody's [ __ ] might wanna look at this yeah so you know we're sending all of those freedom of information requests yeah to all the parks except ireland and northern ireland yeah uh with the question have you all your staff members recorded any lessons pumas or links all of them but one which is lake district have got back saying pretty similar responses so brecon beacons were no dartmoor said they had no records exmoor said no new forest had no confirmed sightings north york smalls however said there were four alleged sightings between 2006 and 2018 in the park peak district said no no sightings pembrokeshire coast said they're not aware of anything and also kane gorm said we do not have any sightings recorded because we have no types of big cats roaming free in this [Music] it's a country bit hard to describe really because you you sort of like pick out pick up the eyes and you pick up the outline of the body is it or isn't it so i've asked a few people about it and it's the european links i've got five sizes eleven feet my mate's got 13 feet so it's two and a half foot long probably about 18 to 20 kilos in weight yeah it was 100 in the world cap do you believe that that was the the only one in the area do you believe that's no no no no um probably 15 16 years ago the forestry commission was coming down popped into the farm and said have you ever seen big cats up there and we said we've heard them but we've never seen them those big cats wasn't blinks they were leopards or humors or something much bigger because the way he described it there was a family of them whenever seven so we we know they're in the area they're so shy you think your eyes are playing tricks on it because one minute they're next to it okay so this this could be quite big like this only happened like a couple of years ago so this could be pretty significant there's nothing ambiguous about it it's just like 100 eurasian links but there's only like a handful of links around under the dangerous world animals act so this could be one of the uk's wild cats ah right then new video coming out here all right so i'm just packing my bag because as you know i said uh we're going off for the weekend to do some big cat hunting like i'm getting stuff packed we got the big boy here ready to go got more clothes than that you know got my t-shirts and shorts we met with james cook who runs a youtube channel which explores big cat sightings in the uk oh my god there's two eyes so what if it's four or something it's gonna charge at you kick it in the head right so basically one thing led to another and i searched on google if big cats have ever lived in the uk and well they sort of have they sort of haven't you know basically from what i found big cats aren't indigenous to the uk but and yes there is a but people reckon they've spotted some knocking about some absolute big bastard cookie hasn't had a big cat sighting so we were eager to get his thoughts on the credibility of the theory from someone who hasn't had the sighting who's looking all the evidence what's your verdict on it at the moment i want to believe it and i struggle with it whereas i see like links and puma as a definite possibility but i i struggle to get on board with the um the idea of a black leopard in this country because the rare is it is and um exactly well the thing is is that you don't get black leopards without um spotted methods yeah most of our sightings that we've gone through the majority of them probably 70 30 or higher is black leopard shall we go see your place where you saw the cat yeah sure so basically up here this part of the road here this is where the animal ran out but from the left side probably just along here somewhere right so it's running across in front of me running running i was doing about probably about this speed and then um as i got to here it jumped into there yeah but there's nothing really there for it to get through okay that's when i saw it's like tail and rabbit was in front of me here right and then the rabbit basically went off there i was frozen for like probably until i was about this point and then yeah it was just like all i could hear was just like my ears ringing i was just like what could you hear my breathing um and yeah i was just so scared but i didn't know what i think it was gonna do like in a car yeah you know but it was just so scary i don't know why the coronavirus pandemic has meant that the filming has been put on hold obviously and i've taken about four or five weeks off from filming this documentary and since taking a step back i've become sort of less immersed in this kind of big cat world and i'm starting to think now if we were to have breeding populations of lynx puma and leopard then there would be far more signs not just in photographic evidence but also in the way that other animals around them are behaving whilst i think there may still be some around a thriving breeding population of either of the three animals let alone all three is seemingly unlikely to me at the moment i was a passenger in a car and um going down this main road and i looked into the woods and as you do i was all just looking as you're going through it was just there sniffing the grain huge long tail couldn't mistake it there's a puma i'm in interest in all animals but the catchers take priority at the moment and we just generally just look for them look for signs look for tracks look for scats scrapes we're at the spot here where you had a camera trap set up and you caught something on the camera trap which you think is pretty intriguing can you just run me through the whole thing from coming to pick it up and then eventually what you found um i believe the camera was already running at the time something triggered a camera so it took three pictures and it goes to the video 10 second video and then suddenly on the video the um i believe it's a cat it's come in at such speed fashion i've seen any dog i mean as you can see it's real rough and the way it's it's gone at speed through here is just unbelievable you said you showed this to some some different people who kind of get their evaluation i've had um dog experts look at it they said ain't a dog i've had deer three deer experts he said that's not a deer a lot of people are saying it's deer chasing the deer but it's clearly not and so even from the first time you look at it you think that's man as soon as i saw it i thought oh what's this what have i got what have i got of course i kept looking at it i must have watched over 250 times and i'm convinced i believe it's a puma i've lived in the forest dane for [Music] 17 18 years i then started my own business i ran a survival school as well survival school was we taught animal tracking and we took wildlife photographers out into the woods taught them how to see wildlife how to walk how to stalk how to think how to find the wildlife how to set up a hide so i've spent a lot of time in the woods you hear the various rumors and the various things and you kind of think it's a pinch of salt and my kids were at school and the school sent a text saying don't walk to pick up your kids there's a large cat that we think could be dangerous walking around the school grounds um so of course i ignored that and decided to walk up and get the kids because i thought it was nonsense and my ex-partner and i were walking along the footpath and we looked across a couple hundred yards away and there is this very large black panther-like cat just walking casually along the edge of the field that was seen by myself and about well every parent at the school really and we decided to go for a bit of a mooch into the woods and the thicker stuff off the beaten track and i'd find scat and it definitely was cat scat and there we found a wild boar that had been killed we need to look at the ribs mate if we can already shaved off back legs eaten oh yeah yeah look at that look at that right off completely and the energy removed cat [ __ ] like that's segmented typical cat kill with two very big um bite marks on either side of its neck and you know you're you're pretty certain there's nothing else that can do this to the ball not not that i could see there's nothing that's going to predate a bore like that in this country all the hallmarks of a big cat kill when i saw it i was like i had no doubt you know eating from the back in towards all the inner organs removed ribs sheared off it was classic kill i've seen i have seen crystal clear footage but people just won't let me have it you know they've shown me it won't let me take it they won't let me copy it i've spoken to forestry commission rangers who know it's here who found dead ones and we're told to keep their moisture [Music] there are some cards and i've got some here uh hold on you might have some oh yeah yeah i've got something oh yeah oh yeah mr bush oh a different type of predator coming up oh my god nightmarish pigeon duck got a fox here crow bird of prey there's a pheasant and a squirrel being friends who never did there's so many deers on this uh it's only old beers small fat dog oh i've got a male and a female pheasant actually in this shot another deer of horse uh horse horse horse some weird homeless guy like [Laughter] okay do you want to take that one and i'll take this one all right gone out for a walk to find his shirt you can go off the beaten track for so long uh and you put a trap up and you think no one's gonna walk past this and you just get like an insane amount of like oddballs like this guy who's charging with a stick oh yes [Laughter] that's the end of mine no linked leopard or humor just squirrels um yeah although do we need to really wrap it up not sure if we do like whether that's something we do in voiceover our search for big cats was fruitless we had one final interview scheduled for the film though in the meantime we thought it would be a good idea to record our final thoughts [Music] all right should i walk in yeah uh is it is it focused so like so what is it the questions like what do i think now okay i definitely thought like throughout the filming that there were three you know those breeding populations of all three animals i was like we got links that should have been shot and killed in somerset beyond that we've just got like 80 of our reports like black leopard so many people have seen that um and you know pumas also kind of made sense as well with ben lee's story how can so many people be going after the same thing and be wrong you know like how is this so many eyewitnesses there could be something to this you know yeah i mean i think it's like super intriguing whether it's like the people that kind of surround it or whether it's this this idea that there's like a elusive beast like lurking in the shadows i always thought was like a really intriguing um sort of story generally as well as just being like you know like this actual potential thing that might be out there since filming i know because because the truth is i just think it's a mad world that i just you know it's nice to dip your toe in it and then think no that's not for me like i've been thinking about this for like years anyway so my perspective on it is like completely kind of skewed from overthinking i don't think my head was like fully clear and since being able to kind of take a step back during the lockdown i kind of think that there's maybe you know a few that might be out there there's still i don't think there's still a convincing case um if you haven't actually had an experience yourself i don't think there's a breeding population that there's thousands out there and you know because how how is there no solid evidence if there's thousands out there that are breeding and as for like you know my sighting and stuff i just think that that's something that i think it's not a problem to be solved anymore it's a um a fascinating thing to dwell on it's probably about probably about it um cool um and the [ __ ] line again like it really really was the best bit well i want at first i i really do want to express my appreciation that you took it seriously i mean i think you did and you you gave folks the benefit of the doubt and you actually went out there and and looked at some evidence um and so that's great um my name is mark elbruck i so i'm the director of the puma program for panthera the global cat conservation organization where we work all over the world i have 20 years of mountain lion or puma or catamount experience i have i don't know caught roughly 250 plus mountain lions across my career i've seen probably 2 500 maybe closer to 3 000 kill sites of animals killed by mountain lions at this point and and do quite a bit of training in helping people learn how to identify the tracks and signs of different wildlife how to interpret a cat kill versus other kills i work with state agencies federal agencies um tribal nations and and private citizens so cool so you've watched our documentary um we'd love to know your thoughts on it the you know there's an interesting speculation about the the winter of 2010 being the cut off for sightings because it was such a brutal winter pumas do have very thin fur compared to to many species and but they can survive in that temperature um but it is brutal on cats and it does kill cats the thing that i thought was the one of the more convincing was the dead sheep you could see it was a throat suffocation he seemed to have evidence of claw marks you know meaning like that the animal mounted from the back end and that's exactly what a lot of cats do is they'll grab their prey pull forward and slip beneath and grip the the throat and they suffocate it here it doesn't say that it's not a lynx versus a puma versus a leopard you know any of those could do it but the fact that there was claw marks on the back like pulling up to get to that position um is very cat like the clamping the nose so that that person so this is they kept talking about how the nose was clamped down mountain lions do do that occasionally and you'll see that once in a while with a deer they'll get on they'll get on an elk and just take it down but it's not common for mountain lions um it is more far more common for jaguars oh then the road kill that was an interesting one right you know it was hard to tell from the photo it looked like it had a short face which would be very cat-like um it had long canines they were long and slender which is very cat-like but that's true of red foxes i mean not that it couldn't be a dog but it's less likely a domestic dog if it's disproportionately longer than the other teeth then we have the dead lynx which clearly is a lynx so that was easy there was that running footage of something super fast like chasing the deer and you could see a dare tail flip on the front animal you know i have no idea what that was could it have been a cat sure you know when they run they do kind of stay at one level they don't you don't go like that so you see this very smooth and that's what that animal was but it was a blur i have no idea what it was okay so now i get to the to the end here so the the bore kill you know first off i'm assuming someone sliced it up because there's this very clean line with fur on both sides and if that's not true then i'm gonna tell you someone did do that and then the other thing that those people brought up was you know that they know forest rangers who found dead cats and are told to shut up first of all i have i don't believe that at all they seek out the most private places on the landscape dense woods shrubbery rock overhangs under a log to curl up and die but as someone who has literally followed mountain lions for 20 years i've found a dead mountain lion well that wasn't killed by a person i don't know if i've ever found one finding dead pumas again it just struck me as something as no people don't find dead pumas they just don't and if they do they certainly don't keep their mouth shut you know that that to me um seemed an odd thing to state [Music] shortly after speaking with mark he sent us a recording of a further thought he'd had now the more i think about this boar kill the more suspicious i get either someone sliced it open to look inside or something the ribs aren't right for a cat kill you know and then you've got these puncture marks which say take an ice pick and stab a stake there's not a cylindrical hole that you can stick a stick in you know a hole is made and then the meat comes back together the depth of those holes was outrageous you know way too huge and long you just don't see that on a catkill the one other part is the scat so it's a super fresh kill let's say a cat actually made the kill and what's produced after they eat is usually diarrhea and there's it's often hard to find because it's usually buried but it's literally a runny black nastiness not a firm cylindrical poop you know at a glance it looks like a cat scat to me but that doesn't mean that someone didn't bring that cat's cat and throw it down next to this carcass because cats almost never really it is a never cats do not poop next to their food they create latrines at some distance away maybe a hundred meters away and so therefore to find a scat that doesn't make sense morphologically and second that it was right next to the kill i am seriously suspicious that this was a setup [Music] so i just just wanted to firstly ask you just straight up um did you and neil hopes this no no absolutely not we didn't hope so it would have been a hell of a hoax to find the wild boar it and then find some uh a big cat scat to put beside it um no it's definitely categorically not a hoax once you've seen one it changes your life forever um i was a very big skeptic when i first moved to the farstein once you see it things change my focus has just become about big cats and it's a little bit of an obsession this is where the existential problem comes in on the one hand you have have this absolutely rock-hard evidence on the other hand you have absolutely no physical evidence you want you to do that you have to somehow get your head around that the possibility that cats could live in between you without being leaving very obvious signs is you know almost absurd [Music] since 1960s it's escalated there have been more and more people reporting there have been more and more farmers with livestock taken the big cats phenomenon will soon not be a phenomenon i've been asked about a range of other sightings you could almost always say it's a domestic cat or a mistake or in one example a toy the animals escape from time to time and so people may occasionally see a mountain lion or a leopard or a jaguar or a lynx or something that isn't supposed to be there but that is a very different thing than saying there's a native or a breeding population that is self-perpetuating on the landscape i'd be adamant that that was killed by a big cat so you know they're out there there's no two ways about that we know there's a conspiracy to hide the truth essentially the question being whether there's an existing breeding population in the uk i'd say that is incredibly unlikely [Music] you

Channel: The Biome Project

Views: 125,946

Rating: 4.8039427 out of 5

Keywords: grizzly bournemouth, grizzly, mike coggan, big cats, full documentary, big cats uk, english big cat, big cat sighting, conspiracy theory, conspiracy documentary, wildlife documentary, leopard, puma, uk documentary, benjamin mee, mark elbroch, dartmoor zoo, exmoor, dartmoor, beast of bodmin, dartmoor beast, grizzly documentary

Id: _gJfkvaxQW0

Length: 46min 59sec (2819 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020