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.
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