Black Leopard Satan arrives at London Zoo 1894

 

Wildwood Kent Slaughters Wolf Pack

  Another establishment which is so badly run that it decides to slaughter an entire wolf pack. How long will this go on/

Wildwood in Kent should be banned from keeping any wolves in future.

The statement:

Those who have visited the park will be aware that the wolf area has recently been closed.

There has been a severe escalation in aggressive behaviour within the Wildwood Kent wolf pack, resulting in multiple life-threatening injuries.

Due to the volatility within the pack, our team has been unable to safely intervene or provide the level of veterinary care required.

We are deeply saddened to share that, following this serious and rapid breakdown in pack dynamics, the decision was made to euthanise our wolf pack this morning.

This decision has been made following detailed discussions between our experienced animal management team and veterinary professionals.

Anyone familiar with Wildwood's work will know that animal welfare is always our highest priority. Euthanasia is only ever considered as a last resort. Over a prolonged period, extensive efforts have been made to manage the pack, support individuals, and prevent escalation. However, the situation presented an ongoing and unacceptable risk to welfare, and we were no longer able to ensure the safety or quality of life of the animals within the group.

The park was closed during this time to allow this to be carried out safely, calmly, and with the respect these animals deserve.

This is an incredibly difficult moment for our team. We are all heartbroken. Many of our staff have cared for these wolves over a long period of time, and this loss will be deeply felt.

We appreciate your understanding and compassion.

The Wildwood Trust team.

The Red Paper 2022 Volume I: Foxes, Jackals, Wolves, Coyotes and Wild Dogs of the United Kingdom and Ireland

 Cover Price Increases later in March 2026

361 pp

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Interior Color & Black and white

Dimensions A4 (8.27 x 11.69 in / 210 x 297 mm

£25.00

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 When the Doggerland bridge flooded the British Isles became separated from

Continental Europe and its wildlife developed uniquely. The British Isles, for the purpose of this work includes Ireland, and isolated the wolves on both became what would be island species not affected by the usual island dwarfism. These wolves, after millennia. Became “unwanted” and forests and woodland was burnt down or cut down for the specific purpose of lupicide; the killing of every and any wolf –and there was a bounty for “a job well done”.

At the same time there also developed three unique island species of Old fox from the coyote-like Mountain or Greyhound fox, the slightly smaller but robustly built Mastiff or Bulldog fox and the smaller Common or Cur fox –the latter like today’s red foxes had a symbiotic relationship with humans.

These canids were mainly ignored until it was decided that they could provide fur and meat and those things earn money. From that point onward, especially after all other game had been killed off, the fox faced what writers over the centuries referred to as vulpicide –extermination through bounties paid, trapping or hunting and despite all the hunters noting that the Old foxes were nearing extinction they continued to hunt until by the late 1880s the Old were gone and replaced by the New –foxes imported by the thousands every year for the ‘sport’ of fox hunting and this importation also led the the UK seeing the appearance of mange (unknown before the importations).

The travelling British sportsmen went coyote, wolf and jackal hunting and on returning to England wanted to bring a taste of this to “the good old country”. Wolves, jackals and coyotes were set up in hunting territories from where they could learn the lay of the land and provide good sport later. Some hunts even attempted to cross-breed foxes, jackals and Coyotes.

Then there were the legendary –almost mythical– “beasts”; the black beast of Edale, the killer canids of Cavan and the “girt dog” of Ennerdale.

In more recent times raccoon dogs and arctic foxes have appeared in the UK; some released for ‘sport’ while others are exotic escapees long since established in the countryside.

If you thought you knew what fox hunting was about prepare to be woken up by a sharp slap to the face and the reality that, by admissions of hunts themselves, this was all about fun and sport and nothing to do with “pest control”.

The Red Paper 2022 Volume II: Wild Cats, Feral and New Native Species

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In 1896 Scottish naturalists and zoologists declared that the true Scottish wild cat had become extinct by the 1860s. What we see today is nothing more than a wild tabby cat. In this work the true history and destruction of wild cats from England, Wales (where hybrids clung on into the 1940s) and Scotland is explored and after decades of research the true look of the wild cat is revealed. The "English Tiger" and "Highland Tiger" truly lived up to that name.

Dogma is finally thrown out.

There is also a look at the "New Native Cats" ranging from Asian Golden Cats, Lynx, Puma and others and the evidence leading to their being so designated.

No silly press or media stories just solid facts backed up by evidence.

The author acted as an exotic species wildlife consultant to UK police forces from 1977-2015 as well as cooperated with university projects on the subject.

Island cats as well as feral cats their lifestyles and problems mare also covered .

Fully referenced and including maps, illustrations and very rare photographs -some never before seen in print- make this a book for amateur naturalists and zoologists.

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96 Pages

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Standard Color, 60# White — Uncoated, Paperback 

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For decades there have been reports of “Big Cats” roaming the British countryside killing sheep and deer. Are all of the observers from naturalists,zoologists, zoo personnel, police and others all mistaken?

Terry Hooper-Scharf set up the Exotic Animals Register (EAR) in 1977 to disprove the claims before become a UK police forces exotic wildlife consultant and member of the Partnership Against Wildlife crime (PAWS).  What he found out was almost unbelievable but with the gathered evidence including DNA results and bone analysis it seemed that there were exotic cats in the UK and that some had been here at least going back to the early 19th century.

The presented evidence saw the Department of Environment Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) force him off the PAWS scheme despite police protests.

Now read fact and not sensationalist press or fringe claims.

A January 1999 Guardian Article on Britain's "Big Cats"

 This article is now 26 years old. I just thought that I would reprint it here as I am mentioned which, of course, gives this article credibility😄

Why on earth some idiot decided that the 'expert' opinion of psychologists was needed when they are not field naturalists and probably do not know a Blue Tit from a Great Tit I have no idea.  If it gets their name in print they love it and makes them seem relevant.

Analysis of the number of cats believed to be in the UK at the time are likely way too high; that subject has been updated and posted on this blog.

Beast in all of us

This article is more than 26 years old

From Bodmin to Gobowen, they lurk menacingly on the fringes of society. But do they exist in the shadows of our hedgerows or the shadows of our mind? Paul Evans tries to separate myth and fact about big cats that have stalked on the wild side for centuries

The Guardian Wed 7 Apr 1999 02.06 BST

Have you seen The Beast? Thousands say they have. Larry Parkes saw it on a bright sunny morning two weeks ago. He was walking his dog in meadows outside Gobowen, in the north-west corner of Shropshire, when two "black panthers" emerged from trees less than 200 yards away.

Parkes describes one as the size of his Great Dane and the other about the size of his collie. "They stood in the field for about 30 seconds," he says. "I could see their yellowish eyes. You could tell they were not dogs by the way they looked and moved. When they took off they loped, like in slow motion, very loose limbed. They were jet black, with long thick tails. I watched them for two to three minutes until they disappeared over the brow of the hill."

Local police checked the area, but they found nothing. Stories like this, which make local news around the country, are just the tip of an iceberg of sightings which usually go unreported. If they are to be believed, there must be many big cats inhabiting Britain.

Larry Parkes's panthers came as no surprise to Terry Hooper, who runs the Bristol-based Exotic Animals Register, which collates and analyses eye-witness and forensic data.

He says this is consistent with similar sightings over a couple of years of a panther with young moving between west Shropshire and Wales. According to Hooper's register, there are 140 melanistic (black) leopards or panthers, 130-140 pumas or mountain lions and 80-100 lynx at large in the UK today. And this, he says, is a conservative estimate.

Scientists say there is not enough concrete evidence to support claims of such populations of large feline predators. After months of research, the Ministry of Agriculture dismissed "The Beast of Bodmin Moor" as non-existant.

Dr Tony Mitchell-Jones, mammal specialist for English Nature, says: "You can't deny that people believe genuinely in these sightings, and you don't like to call them liars, but if big cats were around in numbers, we would have evidence in the form of droppings and prey remains, and we don't."

The burden of proof is back on to the witnesses. Dr Christopher French, a psychologist, says: "Psychological research shows that memory and perception are constructed so that we see what we expect to see." French maintains that, like the acceptance of the stereotypical alien following the film Close Encounters, the repeated reports of big cats have gained sufficient cultural acceptance to become a "contagion".

Another psychologist, Dr Susan Blackmore, says there are evolutionary reasons why our visual systems are honed for survival and interpret images as possible predators. "The ‘panthers' are a cultural phenomenon," she says, "inhabiting a cultural environment." As such, she thinks they are memes - stories or ideas analogous to genes, replicated by their telling and which take on a successful life of their own.

The Beast in Britain is certainly an old story. The Leicestershire legend of Black Annis, or Cat Anna, which survived into the beginning of this century, told of a big black cat which hid in an oak tree and pounced on its victims to suck their blood. Annis links back to the Celtic Annan, goddess of May-eve hare hunts, transferred to Easter Monday, who was both nymph and hag.

Not far away, in Castleton, Derbyshire, the ancient celebration of the Garland King on May 31 has a horse rider in a cage of flowers re-enacting human sacrifice to Taranis, the Gaulish death goddess.

Twenty years after her book, Cat Country, claimed there was an as yet undiscovered big cat native to Britain, Di Francis is still convinced the scientists have not been looking hard enough. She believes the usual account of the presence of big cats are a consequence of the 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act, which established stringent licensing of wild creatures. Many owners of exotic cats released their pets into the countryside and it may be these which are now breeding in the wild.

But, claims Francis, this does not account for the high numbers of big black cats sighted - melanistic forms are uncommon in nature - and does not explain frequent reports of big striped and silver-grey cats.

Meanwhile, as most public discussion on big cats is confined to the realms of cryptozoology and the paranormal, for many British farming communities, The Beast has again become a symbol of menace.

In the Somerset Mendips, Terry Dimmock has issued a contract to assassinate the Beast of Axbridge. The panther-like creature seen regularly on his farm is, he claims, responsible for the deaths of many lambs. He is angry that he has to deal with a problem created by the authorities which, he says, either deny the cat's existence or are deliberately concealing the truth.

But what is the truth? "Science has such prestige," said the philosopher Mary Midgeley on the radio recently, "that other truths are not accepted."

The truths of people such as Larry Parkes seem to have little worth in the discourse surrounding the big cat phenomenon. It is here that the faultlines between science and the vernacular experience of nature begin to widen. In this gap, a less governable, more animistic interpretation of nature emerges, testing the boundaries of what we are willing to experience. To some, the presence of the "panthers" is a blessing.

The question may be not do they exist, but how do they exist. We have projected so much of our dreams, anxieties, stories and theory into the environment that the world around us has become a magic-eye picture. To celebrate The Beast is a denial of thousands of years of our history, throughout which we have struggled to control wild nature and bend it to our will.

Now, like wolves, which are said to appear when European society is in turmoil, the big cats are prowling the margins of the millennium, watching the fabric of history weaken.

The habitat of Britain's Beast may be as much social and cultural as it is ecological. But whether myth, meme or menace, as the big cat phenomenon becomes more cryptic it reveals more about ourselves and our world.

Signs of an Exotic Cat Kill