[oliwarner]

But they are reported quite frequently.

I live in East Anglia and there is at least one sighting every couple of years, often with significantly blurry photo evidence of a dark, pantherine animal, 100m+ away. It's relegated to the "and finally" segment of local news.

I don't think I believe it either but the British countryside is vast, well stocked. An animal like this could evade human contact if it wanted.

[novaleaf]

While there are definately parallels with bigfoot sightings here, I can personally vouch for how rare cat sightings are.

I have spent a lot of my life in deep wildernes, and the only time I saw a big cat in the wild was when I was a kid (aprox 14yo), up in mid- British Columbia (Canada), literally a hundred miles from any town.

I was alone, waiting at our truck while the family was checking if a side-road was traversable. (My dad was a big wilderness fisher). maybe half a kilometer down the "main" (dirt) road, I saw a huge cat casually walk across the road, into the forest on the other side.

It looked completely black, but likely because the side facing me was in shade. Cougars are the only big cat native to the area.

Of course my dad dismissed my account as daydreaming.

I have seen bear, bobcat, and even Coyotee in the wild. Not wolf though.

[eszed]

I can corroborate. I grew up somewhere where we heard cougars regularly (for those of you who don't know, they scream at night - it's a distinctive, spooky sound), and spent a lot of time in the woods. My ambition was to spot one, but though I found scat and paw prints and deer I was pretty sure they'd killed I never saw one in the flesh.

A neighbor found one dead, one time. (Dead from illness; I never heard of one being hit by a car - I think they're too smart for that.) A few other people I know were luckier, and had sightings, all of them too brief to photograph.

I'm skeptical about British big cats, but think it's plausible that (if they exist) they could remain all-but-invisible, and agree that corroboration would be likeliest by spoor or DNA, not by sight.

Edit to add: My totally amateur guess is that they wouldn't be cougars, because they scream, and I've never seen anyone reporting hearing that in the UK; and they're not likely to be leopards, because they hang out in trees, and are relatively easy to spot when they do. I'd say jaguars, which do neither, and occasionally come in a black variant. I'm still skeptical, but that it is remotely plausible - magnitudes more plausible than Bigfoot! - makes it an intriguing story.

[Kon-Peki]

> I never heard of one being hit by a car - I think they're too smart for that.

It happens frequently enough [1] [2]. Both of those are in areas where the cats aren’t supposed to exist!

> I'd say jaguars, which do neither, and occasionally come in a black variant.

Yep, the article says that the DNA matched a leopard

[1] https://m.startribune.com/cougar-spotted-in-minneapolis-kill...

[2] https://kanecountyconnects.com/article/MountainLion-KaneCoun...