Mutant moggies could be getting mistaken for big cats!

The Gloucestershire Live website has the above title and in my honest opinion it is completely misguided. The journalist is saying that people are mistaking enormous domestic cats for black panthers roaming around the British countryside. It is not a question of mutant domestic cats at all. This is a question of the human brain. I stress; these are not mutant, large domestic cats that are being mistaken for big cats but standard domestic cats which have been enlarged in the minds of their observers (at a distance).

This is assessed by Frank Tunbridge as a very large feral cat but how did he accurately assess size with such a poor-quality image? It is all in the mind and it is sad. Image: Frank Tunbridge.

And the reason why people historically enlarge the size of domestic cats and believe that they're looking at a big cat is because they are frightened. Fear is in the minds of most people all the time at a low level. It's guides them and dictates what they do in life. And there seems to be an inherent fear of cats. It is probably a throwback to time when people were living in caves 100,000 years ago.

At that time humans genuinely had to fight off marauding big cats because they were prey animals. And there were many of them even in Europe. Times have changed. Humankind has more or less exterminated all big cats from the planet. Certainly, in comparison to the very early days of the big cats there are very, very few left because of human persecution and the destruction of their habitat by people.

But there is still this fear of big cats and there are still people who actually believe that they exist in England, living in the countryside. And yet they have never produced hard evidence. The best that they can come up with are woolly pictures, badly out of focus or taken from such a distance that they are completely unsharp and unreadable.

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There are some diehard big cat enthusiasts who insist that they are out there but even the enthusiast Frank Tunbridge thinks that some people are mistaken and jumping to conclusions. Well, that's an admission but it's about time. I'm afraid it is obvious that people are coming to misguided conclusions.

He states that there are mutant moggies but he is wrong in that as well. He said that three women had seen a huge black moggy in Matson. They said that the animal walked along in front of them and left the area by the fishing lake. They describe the animal as having a long body, jet black in colour and the size of a small German Shephard dog. Mr Tunbridge set up a camera trap and on it is a recording of this large black cat. He thought the cat was a large moggy but the quality of the imagery is so bad that it is impossible to assess it (see pic above).

He refers to Australia where, indeed, some feral cats have grown quite large because of an abundance of prey animals. But this is a misconception as well. These large Australian feral cats are pretty large but they are nowhere near the size of the big cats. You would still describe them as small wild cats, the size of a large domestic cat. 

And Britain is not Australia. There are no feral cats in Britain of any size larger than standard domestic cats. It's about time that they faced up to reality which is that they are hostages to their distorted beliefs born out of fear.