The Effect
It is 1983 and, on the rugged moorlands of south west of England, a farmer makes an astonishing claim. He states that over the course of just three months, well over a hundred of his sheep have been mysteriously slaughtered.
The animals, he says, have been brutally slain by an elusive and merciless killer. And the killings are not the result of errant dogs or determined foxes. The dead sheep have been completely stripped of their flesh, with only their spinal columns remaining, making them classic examples of a big cat kill.
Shockwaves ripple through the Devonshire farming community, and more and more witnesses begin to come forward. Some allege they have had their own livestock killed. And not just sheep, but ponies, too. Many others claim to have seen the creature. And their descriptions are always the same. According to the now numerous accounts, the enigmatic predator takes the form of a large and muscular black cat, around the height of a labrador, with a long tail. Crucially, most of the sightings seem to have occurred at dawn and dusk, the times of day a crepuscular predator like a large cat is most active.
Eric Ley, the farmer who originally came forward to claim a hundred of his sheep had been slain, says he’s also seen the beast, with his physical description of the animal tallying with other eyewitness accounts.
From there, reports intensify, and encounters with the creature now dubbed ‘the Beast of Exmoor’ spread far and wide, the story even being taken up by the national press. The Daily Express newspaper offers a substantial financial reward for any concrete photographic or other evidence relating to the ‘beast’.
As Devonshire locals fear for their safety and farmers for the safety of their livestock, the Department of Agriculture steps in, employing a team of Royal Marine snipers to hunt down the elusory beast of Exmoor once and for all.
Both day and night, the men from the Royal Marines stake out large swathes of the moor, armed and concealed in camouflaged hides, yet still the large black animal remains but a shadow, despite sightings in the area continuing unabated.
By 1987, the Beast of Exmoor has supposedly been responsible for the deaths of over two hundred farm animals, and yet it has, over the course of the years it has been at large, steadily managed to evade, not only capture, but all other evidence of its existence. Only the eyewitness reports remain, with no photos, no videos, and no credible pug marks (or footprints) to back them up. So the hunt goes on, with many now determined that they will be the one to find the definitive piece of evidence of the fearsome big cat.
The cryptozoologist Peter Bailey spends a total of fifteen years laying traps in an attempt to capture the mysterious Beast of Exmoor, to no avail. Although on one occasion, when changing the bait in one of his traps, he did manage to trip the mechanism and ensnare an animal. Himself. As a result, he was caught in his own trap for days, forced to eat the raw meat he’d laid for the beast until he was finally rescued.
Between 1995 and 2001, yet another series of attacks on farm animals ensues. But by this time it is nearly two decades since Eric Ley’s initial reports of the hundred dead sheep. The Ministry of Agriculture continues to monitor the supposed encounters with the Beast of Exmoor, before offering an official statement in the early 2000s. The creature, they say, probably never existed. It was simply either a hoax or a misidentification of another animal.
But in 2006, a Devonshire farmer makes a truly extraordinary discovery in one of his fields. It is the skull of a big cat. And, furthermore, the British Big Cat Society confirms its authenticity. Surely this provides the long sought-after proof, verifying that the now legendary Beast of Exmoor is real, after all?
The Method
When the skull unearthed in the farmer’s Devonshire field is examined, it is found not to be a leopard’s skull at all. It is a puma skull. But, even though these wild cats look quite different to leopards, the discovery still begged the question: could the Beast of Exmoor have actually been a puma?
It is highly unlikely that it was, since there are no scientifically-documented cases of pumas (cats also known as cougars or mountain lions) being melanistic, or black in colour. So the large black cat on Exmoor must have been a melanistic leopard or jaguar, the only two big cats that are known to exhibit this specific genetic colouration.
Around the time of the reports of the Beast of Exmoor in the early 1980s, a new theory came to the fore. That is that the big black cat was actually someone’s escaped, or illegally-released, pet. It’s a hypothesis that could definitely explain some of the mystery of whether wild cats might be at large in the English countryside, if not all.
In the 1960s and 70s, the keeping of exotic animals was not illegal in the UK, and large cats such as lions were even sold in the London department store Harrods. But in 1976, the Dangerous Wild Animals Act was created, which regulated the private ownership of animals like wild cats, making it illegal to keep them without a licence.
As a result of this new law, could the owner of a melanistic leopard or jaguar, not knowing what else to do with it, or unwilling to relinquish their pet to another keeper, have simply let their animal loose on Exmoor? In a word, yes. It’s perfectly possible that sightings of ‘the beast’ dating from the 1970s and even early 80s could have been a big cat that had escaped or been freed from captivity.
Prior to the sightings of the beast of Exmoor, there were a number of circuses in town using large cats as part of their show. And Eric Ley, the farmer whose sheep were killed, even said he once saw a local man exercising big cats on leads on the moor. Could the skull found in that Devonshire farmer’s field have belonged to a previously-captive puma, unwisely liberated by its owner?
Let’s accept the eyewitness accounts at face value, and assume that the people who said they’d seen a large black cat on Exmoor in the early 1980s were correct. Let’s also suppose that what they’d seen was someone’s pet. A pet leopard, which is a more globally widespread and adaptable big cat than a jaguar, and is also a cat that would have been more easily obtainable as an exotic pet in 1970s Britain.
So, by killing one hundred of Eric Ley’s sheep in the space of just three months, that released leopard would have been consuming a whole sheep every day, way more meat than such a cat would need to survive. Could the numbers of dead sheep have been exaggerated? Could some of them have instead been killed by dogs let off their leads? Or perhaps some unscrupulous locals, riding in the wake of the Beast of Exmoor reports, killed a number of sheep in an attempt to escalate the drama, and keep the story going?
The fact that sightings persisted well into the early 2000s implies that the original cat somehow found a mate and produced offspring, offspring that were also melanistic. But could a once-captive leopard really have survived the exposed landscape of Exmoor, to mate with another illegally released leopard and produce cubs of its own?
Despite being remarkably adaptable cats, in order to successfully sustain themselves and the wider population, male African leopards require ranges of between 13 and 174 square miles. Isolated scraps of countryside, carved up by roads, railways and cities are landscapes disastrous for big cats, animals that need wild corridors to link their habitat. In order for there to be a sustainable population of large cats, or leopards, in the UK, then there would need to be around one hundred wild leopards. A hundred leopards living in such a small and densely-populated country, while leaving almost no evidence of their existence, would be next to impossible. And it’s where the theory of large cats roaming the British Isles year after year falls flat.
But could something else altogether have been behind the eyewitness accounts of the Beast of Exmoor? That is, some kind of social panic? After Eric Ley’s initial reports, more and more people came forward, convinced they too had seen a large black cat. But by the time they did, news of the wild and dangerous beast stalking the moors of north Devon had had time to spread, tapping into one of humankind’s longest-standing evolutionary fears: a large, nighttime hunter armed with claws and fangs, capable of catching and dispatching a man with a single swipe.
A sense of panic spreading amongst the population causes quite innocent happenings to be grossly misinterpreted. For example, when an animal carcass was found on a north Devon beach, locals were convinced it belonged to the Beast of Exmoor, that this was finally the proof they had been looking for. But when that carcass was analysed, it was confirmed to be nothing more than the remains of a seal, washed ashore by the tide.
Ultimately, the only evidence we have of the Beast of Exmoor’s existence - and the evidence of other big cats in the UK as a whole - are eyewitness accounts. To date, it appears that no other credible evidence has come to light. The pug marks that are photographed in English mud and posted on British big cats forums turn out to be nothing more than dog prints; their supposed kills just the remains of livestock, pulled apart by foxes or badgers, or opened up by crows.
And, even though large cats are so elusive that it’s possible to go years in the Amazon without seeing a jaguar, surely, decades later, some other evidence of the Beast of Exmoor would by now have come to light? Yet in our era of camera traps, smartphones and high-tech telephoto lenses, all the footage captured appears to show domestic cats shot from a distance, large grazing animals or dogs. Or else the footage has been digitally-altered, with images of big cats taken elsewhere overlaid onto a perfectly unremarkable photograph of an English field.
As beautiful and beguiling as big cats are, until definitive evidence of their presence in the UK countryside exists, maybe we should instead turn our attention to the wild creatures we do have; creatures that need our help to survive a busy, changing human world, before they too go the same way as the now extinct wild cats that once roamed our country.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
