THE GLOUCESTERSHIRE LEOPARD
While reports of alien big cats (ABCs) in the UK have been accumulating steadily since the 1960s, leading many wildlife experts to conclude that there is an unacknowledged population of large predatory felids living in our countryside, concrete evidence of their existence has been frustratingly difficult to secure. Now, though, a team of documentary makers are claiming that they have DNA evidence that leopards are indeed living wild in the British countryside. This would tie in with the identification of ABCs as “black panthers”, since leopards are one of the two big cat species that have a black, or melanistic, form, and most of the British big cat sightings are of black animals.
Dragonfly Films, who have produced a, claim to have retrieved hairs believed to be from a big cat from a barbed wire fence on an unnamed Gloucestershire farm where there had been some “unusual predatory activity”. They say that this involved a sheep kill in 2022, at a time when there had been several ABC reports in the local area, and was from a farm where ABC evidence had been previously found in 2017.
