A few years after the law changed, a puma was caught in the Highlands. Subsequently named Felicity, she was trapped in 1980 by a farmer frustrated by a series of attacks on livestock.<\/p>\n
She went on to live contentedly in captivity. Her condition and relative tameness suggested she had been released into the wild from a private collection. After her death in 1985 she was stuffed and displayed in Inverness Museum, where she remains on show.<\/p>\n
Paul Macdonald believes Scotland, with its relatively temperate climate, vast areas of remote countryside and an abundance of wild prey such as deer, is a good breeding environment for big cats. <\/p>\n
He believes the cats people claim to see today are descended from the animals released in the wake of the 1976 act.<\/p>\n
Sceptics ask why we don’t see more of them, and why the photos of big cats cited as evidence are often blurry and ambiguous.<\/p>\n
“There are understandable reasons for a relative lack of images when it comes to sightings,” Paul says. <\/p>\n
“Most sightings are typically five seconds or less. It typically takes around seven seconds or more to deploy a phone or camera from a pocket, switch it on and take a clear image. <\/p>\n
“In any case, every encounter is completely unexpected. And the witness invariably is left in a state of shock, awe or fear from what they’ve just seen.”<\/p>\n
He says the bones, prints, photos and testimony they’ve collected leave him in no doubt that big cats are out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few years after the law changed, a puma was caught in the Highlands. Subsequently named Felicity, she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":551024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-551023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}