Picture Piece: Beasts

In the 1770s, the essayist William Cobbett was thrashed by his father for insisting he had seen a feline beast in the hollow of a tree. Unbeknown to him, he wasn’t alone – ‘beast sightings’ have occurred in Britain for centuries. Theories about why are almost as numerous as the sightings themselves. Ufologists have coined the term ‘cat-flap’ to denote an area of high ‘beast’ activity and believe that sightings may be visitations from a parallel universe. Reports of pumas, panthers, leopards and lynx have entered contemporary mythology – the Surrey Puma, Beast of Bodmin, Crondal Cougar, Munstead Monster and the Shooters Hill Cheetah have become almost household names. But none, despite their apparent ubiquity, have ever been caught. At least, not in the flesh. Videos taken over five months by Newquay Zoo are being claimed as evidence that a hybrid European wildcat is roaming the countryside. Until the Dangerous Wild Animals Act was introduced in 1976, it was possible to buy big cats at Harrods. The zoo believes ‘beasts’ might simply be offspring from department store big cats released into the countryside. Another hypothesis is that beast sightings are a kind of wish-fulfilment – unconscious projections of frustrated Dionysian impulses in an overly-rationalised world. Dionysus is often associated with big cats: he journeyed to India on a chariot drawn by back panthers and was then transformed into a lion. His cousin Pentheus was torn apart by women who mistook him for a wildcat.