British big cats

There have been rare isolated incidents of recovered individual animals, often medium-sized species such as the Eurasian lynx, though in one 1980 case, a puma was captured alive in Scotland.

[4][5] Supposed sightings made from a distance have been largely written off as domestic cats close to the subject being misidentified as a larger animal sited farther away,[6][7] with one folklorist considering such sightings of creatures to be little more than a "media artifact" driven by British journalistic practices in the 1970s and 1980s[8] while another described it as the result of a situation where "media-generated interest encourages rumour, misinterpretation, and exaggeration".

[11][page needed] William Cobbett recalled in his Rural Rides how, as a boy in the 1760s, he had seen a cat "as big as a middle-sized Spaniel dog" climb into a hollow elm tree in the grounds of the ruined Waverley Abbey near Farnham in Surrey.

[29] Beyond these rumours regarding the creature itself, it has been posited by one journalist that the lasting legacy of the urban legend may be as a mythological base that real-life wildlife stories such as the Emperor of Exmoor can reference.

Zoo director Eddie Orbell concluded that the animal had been tamed and might not have been released for long, noting that it enjoyed being tickled.

[32] On two separate occasions, jungle cats have been found dead after being hit by a car, with the most accepted theory being that these are individuals escaped from private ownership.

[6][34] In a well-reported 2001 case ("the Beast of Barnet"), a young female Eurasian lynx was captured alive by police and vets in Cricklewood, North London, after a chase across school playing fields and into a block of flats.

[6] In 2006, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published a list of predatory cats typically kept as exotic pets that they know to have escaped in the United Kingdom, although most of these have been recaptured.