Yesterday, we shared a report from Richard and Philip, who claimed to have taken a photo of a large black cat roaming Chester’s Grosvenor Park.
Today, thanks to the efforts of the Puma Watch community, we are able to confirm their report is a ‘hoax’. Using open-source journalism techniques, we have successfully matched the location of their photo with the jaguar enclosure at nearby Chester Zoo – enabling us to eliminate their report from our ongoing investigations.
This is the second time we’ve been able to conclusively ‘debunk’ reports of a big cat in recent months. In February, we received multiple sightings, including a video, of a creature prowling fields near Trelogan.
Within days, we tracked down the owner of an incredibly large pet cat living nearby, and were able to confirm that the ‘big cat’ caught on video was actually Sheldon, described as “the biggest softy ever”. His owner was forced to buy a dog cage to take him to the vets as he can’t fit in a cat carrier.
However, the witnesses reporting sightings of Sheldon genuinely (and understandably) believed they could have encountered a ‘big cat’. Unfortunately on this occasion, it seems that Richard and Philip intentionally staged a hoax encounter – though they were quickly figured out by the Puma Watch community.
The hoax comes after a series of sightings in Chester, including one where a big cat was caught on camera in Chester Meadows, just metres from Grosvenor Park.
On Friday 16th April, Alan Standing spotted what could have been a puma near Blacon, at a location well under a mile from four other recent sightings. Just along the canal to the North, a large, black animal with a very long tail was spotted twice within a week, around the abandoned Old Oaks Golf Course and the Countess of Chester Country Park.
The sightings followed a 4ft-long cat “with a great big tail” being spotted twice in one night in fields bordering Blacon, behind Sealand Road Asda.
Big cat sightings are now so commonplace in Chester they have been immortalised in the ‘Lego Chester’ display within Chester Market. Just last week, a member of the public reported an encounter with a “growing and snarling” creature in Huntington’s Caldy Valley Nature Park, while in December, a big cat was caught on camera prowling Chester Meadows.
As seen with Llandundo’s now-famous goats, who have taken to roaming the town’s deserted streets during the coronavirus lockdowns, it’s likely that the reduced levels of human activity over the last year is encouraging big cats to roam further from the hills into more populated areas.
When big cats were banned as pets in the 1970s, it was legal to release them into the countryside to avoid expensive rehoming costs. Owners from across the UK travelled to areas like Wales to release their cats in the remote environment, where small but significant populations have thrived ever since.