Big Cats in the UK: The Black Beast of Exmoor and Its Many Relatives

One of the supposed antecedents of the Ozark Howler is a legend or legends passed down from colonizers’ ancestors in the UK: a great black beast, possibly demonic, who has haunted various parts of the island for time out of mind. Originally it was described as a gigantic black dog, but in the twentieth century, the story shifted. From the 1970s onward, eyewitness after eyewitness has reported seeing a huge black cat—far too big to be a domestic cat. The animal they describe is the size and shape of a leopard.

Thousands of years ago, the UK was home to lions, leopards, and other large predators, but all of those have long since gone extinct. The only native wild cat left is the Scottish wild cat, which is about the size of a large Maine Coon. It’s found only in Scotland, and it’s very rare.

And yet the proliferation of sightings in England and Wales as well as Scotland indicates that something is out there. There’s video, there’s evidence: livestock maulings and mutilations, even a boy who claims to have been swiped in the face by a big cat (though a big-cat expert has debunked that one). Some of the evidence is pretty striking.

In 2008, MonsterQuest summed up the story so far. The episode leads with an account of the history of exotic pets in the UK. There was no regulation of these until 1976, and in 1981 it became illegal to keep a big cat in the country.

The timing is pretty interesting. In 1983, the Black Beast of Exmoor slaughtered over a hundred sheep. Royal Marines were called out to hunt the animal down. They didn’t succeed, but at least one Marine claims to have seen something large and dark that fled before he could get a good look at it.

There are a Lot of photos of big, black, catlike creatures all over the island, from Devon all the way up into Scotland. There’s also a swath of deceased animals, from sheep to deer, that may have been brought down by dogs, but in multiple cases, experts have determined that the method of the kill is more characteristic of a big cat than a canine.

And then there are the eyewitnesses. Hundreds of them over the years. Big cat, they say. Big, black, long tail. And tracks—many tracks. There’s a Big Cat Society that keeps records of sightings and investigates the most plausible.

The experts consulted in the episode maintain that leopards and other big cats are highly adaptable and can handle cold and wet, which contradicts what the show had to say about big cats in the Ozarks. Winters in the UK, it’s true, are not quite as harsh as winters in Missouri and Arkansas in the US. With plenty of game and livestock to feed on, and remote country to lair in, a leopard could do well enough even in the dead of winter.

MonsterQuest gets hold of DNA samples from a longtime investigator and sends them to a lab in Edinburgh. In the meantime a crew of trackers and wildlife experts forays into the Beast of Exmoor’s hunting grounds with camera traps and cat lures (bobcat gland extract, to be specific). Other investigators test eyewitnesses with silhouettes of cats and discover that the witnesses are actually accurate as to the size of what they say—and they’re consistent about seeing leopard-sized cats.

The physical evidence the show is able to find doesn’t check out. Video of a black cat is probably not a big cat, but a very thin, long-tailed feral domestic cat. A cast of a pawprint turns out to be made by a large dog. And the DNA tests as various species of deer, and domestic dog.

Fifteen years later, in 2023, Expedition X took aim at the story. Sightings have continued, and they’ve shown up all over the UK. While MonsterQuest focused on the area around Exmoor in the southeast, Jess and Phil head to Wales and the Peak District, where in January of 2023, a farmer and his sons encountered a large black cat and photographed its tracks in the snow.

They were hunting a predator that was killing a neighbor’s lambs. Not only did they see the animal, they heard its cry, “a strange, very deep howl.” (Shades of the Ozark Howler.)

Jess and Phil duplicate part of the MonsterQuest experiment with camera traps and scent lures (civet perfume, to be precise). To those they add more of their cool tools: tree and ground hunting blinds, Velcro fur traps, night-vision goggles, game-calling equipment, and the trusty FLIR infrared camera.

They find a lot more evidence than the previous investigators. As soon as they arrive in the area where the farmer saw the cat, they come across prints of a large animal, scratches on a log, the fresh kill of a bird, and a sheep’s skull with the marks of a predator’s teeth. And they see something large, dark, and able to climb trees—and find some hair in the fur trap. They also capture video.

One of the more interesting experts they talk to does something called toothpick analysis: the study of bite marks on bones. He can analyze a bone of any age and identify the animal that chewed on it. Predators have distinct patterns of tooth cusps that allow him to determine whether it’s a feline or a canine, and even to identify the species.

DNA in this case is inconclusive, but it does appear to be feline. But what’s more convincing is a combination of eyewitness report from a railway inspector who came face to eyeshine with a big black panther one night, and video from the camera trap. Jess sees a pair of glowing eyes staring at her, and records them on camera; she also claims to have seen a second pair that turned away and seemed to head up a tree. The camera trap catches something long, dark, with a long tail and a distinctly feline silhouette.

This is interesting enough, and it’s great to see the camera capture. But there’s a coda to this combination of stories. A report showed up in the international news this past May.

In October 2023, the news story relates, a woman in the Lake District, which is north of the Peak District and is equally remote and thinly populated, startled a predator which was feeding on the carcass of sheep. It was a large black cat, she said, “the size of a German Shepherd dog.”

She swabbed the carcass and sent the sample to a podcast titled “Big Cat Conversations,” which in turn sent it to a lab at the University of Warwick. Professor Robin Allaby, who analyzed it, claims to have found “Panthera DNA,” and believes that the sample is authentic. The material is minimal but, he says, definitive. He can’t identify the specific variety of cat from what little material there is (interesting how similar this is the findings of Expedition X from earlier in 2023), but he is certain that there is a big cat on the loose in Cumbria.

I’m sure there’s blowback from other experts because of how tiny the sample is. And yet, add it to all the eyewitness accounts, the videos that haven’t been debunked, and the fact that there is a known point at which the stories began—which coincides with the crackdown on exotic pets—and I think it’s hard to dispute that there just may be a breeding population of black leopards in the UK.

Cryptids they are not; they’re a known species, and they’re not extinct in the wild. But they are surviving and apparently thriving well outside of their native range. It just happens that they’ve fit into a very old niche: a black beast that hunts the night and preys on domestic livestock. So far they haven’t seriously harmed a human, though eyewitness after eyewitness, including Jess of Expedition X, tells of being watched and stalked but eventually left alone. That’s legend fodder right there.