Big Cat Panic Paralyzes Pembrokeshire!

Oh no, that was Paris a couple of weeks ago when marksmen and helicopters were deployed to track down a putative tiger that turned out to be a fat cat.*

It's an old story. There have been numerous reported sightings of feral felines in Wales as indeed everywhere else in the country. They all turn out to be, if anything, mis-identified domestic pets. Even tracking and trapping exercises by wildlife experts and ardent believers have yielded no credible evidence that there are big cats at large in the countryside, just as efforts to confirm the existence of the Loch Ness monster and the Tibetan yeti have failed to convince.

George Monbiot, in a recent article relating to the Parisian 'tiger', suggests these fantasies represent an unconscious yearning for the wild in our domesticated lives.
Over the past generation, our engagement with the natural world has collapsed. Since the 1970s the average area in which children roam without supervision has decreased by almost 90%. In one generation the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places in the UK has fallen from more than half to fewer than one in 10. As the abundance and diversity of wildlife has declined, as our lives have become tamer and more predictable and our physical challenges have diminished to the point at which the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts, perhaps imaginary big cats answer an unmet need, releasing us from ecological boredom.

Bruce Chatwin hypothesized in The Songlines that Homo sapiens possesses an archaic memory trace of the prehistoric Dinofelis, the ancestor of modern Felidae that preyed upon the early humans who shared their caves until the discovery of fire gave people the upper hand over cats. But such was the terror that these predators generated that they live on in our myths and our imaginations.



* In no way am I suggesting that Nero is overweight, although the vet did recently remark that he is very well grown for six months.