In the idyllic English countryside witnesses claim to have seen a monstrous black cat. Livestock has been slaughtered and one man claims to have been attacked. Thus begins Monster Quests's search for a giant predatory cat in the British Isles.

Historically many big cats have lived in the isles, including jaguar and even sabre-tooth tiger, but none more recent than 10,000 years ago.  At least, none that were native — during the 1970's it became a status symbol to own big cats as pets in the United Kingdom and there were no laws to regulate such ownership.  In 1976 British Parliament enacted such a law, requiring people to purchase an expensive license in order to keep such animals as pets. Unfortunately they neglected to consider the repercussions of this new law, which led to some owners releasing their pets into the wild rather than pay the license fee.

…that's right, British citizens released giant predatory cats like jaguars and leopards into the wild of their own backyards. Do you want to know what the weird thing is (yes, there is a weird thing) ?  It turns out that this was technically legal.  No law existed prohibiting such action, until around 1981 when one was finally made.

I'm going to start off with the DNA evidence, because it was rather anti-climactic when it aired near the end of this episode. One amateur researcher had been collecting hair and feces samples from numerous locations where sightings occurred and of all the samples with identifiable DNA there was a collection of animals ranging from deer to pig with no felines to be seen. Needless to say, the researcher was somewhat disappointed by the lab's findings.

There did seem to be a real abundance of photographic evidence, however. The problem with the photographic evidence, as usual, was that you couldn't really call any of it conclusive.  As might be expected, some of the photos were blurry while others were relatively clear but the subject of the picture was fairly distant. The biggest flaw with the photographs is almost always with the method of photography itself — it's not stereoscopic.

We have two eyes that are positioned a couple of inches apart. This allows us to judge distance fairly accurately. We don't consciously think about the math, but our brain compares the image coming from each eye, notes the slight differences between them and gives us an idea how far away the object we're viewing actually is.

With a photograph, it's like looking through only one eye — and that doesn't give us enough information to judge distance, and therefore we cannot use a photograph to judge size.  The exception to this is when there are clear points in the foreground and background that are of known dimensions, but short of seeing an animal standing behind a rock of known size and in front of a tree of known size there really isn't any way to be certain how big the animal is from a photo. That being said, some of the photos were clearly of black cats that seemed significantly larger than a house cat.

One family had some further physical evidence of size, however. Walking home one day the children spied a large paw print in the ground. Their mother ran home and got some plaster, taking an impression of the print.  The print was definitely of a size with jaguar or leopard prints and looked very similar, but a big cat expert thought the toes were more round (cat toe prints are typically elongated and come to a point at the top) and therefore indicative of a large canine, rather than cat.

In 2000 an eleven year-old boy was walking along a farm road when he claimed to have seen a bushy black tail, hooked at the end, sticking out above the two-foot high grass alongside the road. Walking close to investigate, he saw it was an enormous cat over two-foot at the shoulder. The boy screamed in fright and startled the animal, which he says swiped at him with a paw before running away.

The boy's mother was interviewed by the local news, which also got clear shots of the boy's injury. She said he came running home with blood running down his face saying that a cat hurt him. When she said the claw marks were too large to be from a cat he told her it wasn't an ordinary cat — it was an enormous black cat, as big as a dog.

Some experts who viewed the child's injuries are extremely skeptical, and I would say rightfully so. There were four claw-marks on his face and the spacing I would say could certainly be indicative of a big cat however the wounds were wholly superficial, which would be extremely unusual if they were inflicted by such an animal. Essentially, with only the child's woulds as evidence the skeptics wouldn't really be convinced unless the kid had half his face ripped off — and as terrible as that might seem, they're not wrong for expecting to see that were a big cat involved. Unfortunately it looks like this is another inconclusive dead end.

The MonsterQuest expedition had one neat trick up their sleeve: Bobcat glands, which essentially mimic the effect of a Bobcat having marked a given area as his or her personal territoty.  Apparently this is a very effective big-cat lure worldwide, from Jaguars in South American to the big cats of Africa, because these territorial cats can't seen to help but investigate who's moving in on their turf.

If a big cat was in the area then the Bobcat gland in concert with a motion-activated camera trap seems an excellent plan, but unfortunately the most action the team got was from a badger — an ornery creature to avoid an face-to-face encounter with to be sure, but it doesn't fit the bill of a large predator that's been killing sheep and wildlife.

…and about that wildlife, one researcher happened upon the carcass of a recently killed deer. When the narrator gave a warning for graphic content ahead I knew were were about to get some good evidence — although it may not have been the best idea to continue eating my Chicken Fiesta Burrito from Taco Bell.  I'm just kidding, as long as I kept thinking "venison" I didn't get grossed out, but the video of the brief deer autopsy wasn't for the faint of heart and I'll spare you the photos. Suffice it to say there were a couple of key points to the killing: There was en enormous puncture mark (as caused by an enormous fang) in the neck fo the animal with the neck having been apparently broken, and much of the skin had been peeled back.

Two biologists reviewed the footage and one of them pointed out that big cats (but typically not canines, such as wolves) peel the skin back from their kills in the manner seen on this deer. It was also noted that the apparent method of the kill, a bite to the neck breaking the spinal cord, was common in big cat kills but not at all indicative of how canines kill their food.

One thing that didn't really get a lot of mention, and I'm not sure why, is the size of the puncture wound and therefore the fang.  There are few predators with enormous teeth like that but all big cats have them. On the other hand, the second biologist seemed to be unconvinced that the wound on the neck was the killing blow because of the lack of congealed blood there. I think I understand his point but I believe that lack of blood could be easily explained in a number of ways such as the bite not severing the major artery.  To me, this was some of the strongest physical evidence of a big cat in the wilds of England.

Earlier I discussed the problems with photography as evidence. Well, as anyone who has read much about cryptozoology, ghosts or even UFOs knows, it's been long-established that human eyes can deceive as well.  With this in mind and in regard to the many eyewitness reports, two scientists had a very simple experiment they wanted to try: Since most of the eyewitnesses reported seeing the creature at a distance and for only a few seconds the scientists created actual-size black and brown cardboard cutouts of various species of cat and placed them in a field some distance away from a viewing point.

The subjects of the experiment were allowed to see the cutouts in the distance for only 5 seconds before being turned around and asked a series of questions about what they had just seen. In each case the results were startling and defied the current scientific wisdom. Even at a distance and in imperfect lighting conditions the witnesses consistently were able to judge the size, shape and color of the animal cutouts accurately. This seems like the natural expectation, since we just discussed how having two eyes allows us to judge distance (and therefore size) but scientists have consistently held that people can easily be mistaken and misidentify what they're really seeing.

Now, to be sure we still cannot claim eyewitness reports as scientific evidence. There are certainly times when it is possible or even probably for someone's eyes to be playing tricks on them; and of course there is always the problem of imperfect memory as well, which this experiment bypassed by interviewing the participants within seconds of their "sighting".  Still, what it does prove is that the flaws of human vision are fewer than many scientists believe and that eyewitness accounts are dismissed out of hand more often than is probably reasonable.

There is, however, one more piece of evidence that takes the specifics of this case head-on; a piece de resistance, if you will. One of the people who did eyewitness a strange animal happened to have come out to a piece of property he owned wielding a video camera, and though he wasn't intent of making a nature documentary he had the presence of mind to switch it on and point it out into his field when he saw an animal that struck him as severely out of place. This is part of that footage, cleaned up, zoomed in and slowed down a bit:

The MonsterQuest team had a big cat expert sit down and analyze this cleaned up footage and after some remarks that seemed to be leaning towards this being a feline of the larger persuasion she suddenly flipped her opinion to state definitely that she thought this was a domestic cat. I have a bit of a problem with her reasoning and therefore her conclusion.

First off, she notes that the tail is long and seems to be hooked at the end. This is a prime physical indicator that we're probably not looking at a domestic cat.  The problem, she says, is that when the cat runs off it seems to have an up-and-down bounding motion to its body.  Large cats, she claims, don't run like that but instead tend to keep their bodies more even to the ground. This sealed the deal for her because she seems to think the motion wholly rules out a "big cat" while the tail only mostly rules out a domestic.

My take on it is this: We're not watching a cat in the middle of a sprint, we're watching a cat spring into action from a dead stop and then there are only a couple of strides we can see before the cat is out of sight. While I agree it's not impossible a domestic cat might have that tail, I think it's extremely irresponsible to watch this animal take two strides from a dead-stop and make a definitive judgement based on such a subtle, borderline observation as the animal didn't run as gracefully as you would have expected a wild leopard to run.

I can understand having an opinion, and using that to qualify or "lean" your answer if you were saying the footage is inconclusive, but she didn't say, "The video isn't clear enough to be sure, but I'm leaning towards a domestic cat." She said she thought the footage was definitively of a domestic cat and I just don't see the evidence and reasoning to support that conclusion.

Moreover, she completely missed a key piece of evidence that was briefly mentioned by someone else in the midst of the investigation: the height of the grass.  This isn't someone's front lawn, that grass isn't trimmed. We discussed earlier how photographs need objects in the foreground and background in order to give a sense of scale or distance, well we may not be able to know if the grass is 4 inches long or 7 inches long, but we can be fairly certain it's somewhere in that ballpark.

That limits any conclusions we draw to be "leaning" as well, since we can't be wholly scientific, but look at the size of that cat next to the size of that grass. By my calculations that cat is somewhere between 20 and 30 inches at the shoulder. Even at the lower extreme, that is far too big to be a domestic cat. Video evidence aside, we just got finished discovering that people can judge size and distance accurately, and the guy who took the video seemed pretty sure this wasn't someone's housecat. Scientifically, that still leaves the possibility that he could be lying, but the possibility that he was mistaken (in thinking this cat was unusually large) doesn't look very strong.

Overall, considering all of the eyewitness reports combined with the interesting research into the human ability to identify size, shape and color at a distance even when seeing something for only a few seconds, left me very open to the possibility there are some felines in the British Countryside that aren't your average housecat and aren't currently documented by the local wildlife organizations.  The video footage left me nearly convinced of that. This is yet another one of those situations where we don't have enough evidence to make a solid case but I think there's certainly enough evidence to take these reports seriously (as the local police seem to) and to continue investigating and carefully evaluating any future evidence.