ABSTRACT
According to recent accounts by social scientists and environmentalists (widely supported by scientists and governmental agencies), most claims and beliefs about the presence of so-called ‘alien big cats’ (henceforth big cats) in Britain are largely imagined fantasies, social constructions and media-driven hysterias (Buller 2004; 2009; Monbiot 2013). The key elements of this story are as follows: a few big cats, escapees, have been found but a belief arose around the preposterous (and unproven) possibility of their surviving and breeding in the countryside; a number of cult-like cryptozoological groups have formed to study and monitor these animals (developing imaginaries that link these cats to other mythic and primordial bestiaries); the press have picked up on these stories and instead of promoting a healthy scepticism they have reinforced a positive sense of their presence, particularly around the rural hinterlands of cities and towns; and in turn, the constant stream of big-cat stories has served to create a solid sense of their presence in the countryside and thus other animals are mistaken for them in the half-light and shadows, predominantly by urbanites. This desire to believe in their presence draws on very deep-seated meanings and changing relationships between British society and British nature. Such sightings are likened to the long history of imaginary beasts in the UK and a yearned-for return of true wildness. In short, it appears that people now believe them to be there, but more than that, they want them to be there, they have become the focus for a new form of aelurophilia, or ‘love of (in this case feral) big cats’. According to accounts by Monbiot (2013) and Buller (2004; 2009), in pre-
scientific Britain, the countryside resounded with all manner of wild animals, beasts, dragons and dangerous spirits. These gave a sharp definition (an important binary boundary) to a sense of humanity, society and culture, a sense of self and of ontological security. The advent of natural history in the seventeenth century, with its rational and empirical ontology, chased the imagined bestiary away while the extension of hunting and bounties killed the last of the wolves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With its remaining stock of ‘meek’ native animals so tightly nestled into the remaining
and highly ordered spaces of hedgerow, coppice, woodland and meadow, the UK had become barely wild at all. Then, modern farming methods rendered the countryside even more controlled, tame and domesticated with decreasing amounts of habitat.
