Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 20, 1995 TAG: 9507200053
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KARIN DAVIES ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
In a hunt that recalled Sherlock Holmes' pursuit of the Hound of the Baskervilles, government wildlife experts investigated a dozen reports of savage attacks on sheep and calves, and local claims that wild cats have frightened children.
The suspicious livestock deaths and big cat sightings have gone on for several years, leading to the belief that some sort of big wild cat was loose on the moor - ``The Beast of Bodmin'' as it came to be known.
Investigators Simon Baker and Charles Wilson spent six months studying videotapes taken by residents, strange paw prints and carcasses of the four farm animals killed during that period.
The examination of the carcasses provided no evidence that big cats were the killers, and Baker said the animals had probably been attacked by dogs or foxes.
Three plaster casts of paw prints taken on Bodmin Moor turned out to be the marks of two cats and one dog. And photographs and video clips also almost certainly showed small domestic cats, the investigators said at a news conference.
``We could find no evidence of the presence of a big cat on Bodmin Moor,'' Baker said. They did not, however, prove beyond doubt that there is not a big cat in the area.
And belief in the beast was still strong on Bodmin Moor, a great, lonely swath of boggy land about 250 miles southwest of London. The beast is the stuff of British legends - such as Scotland's Loch Ness monster and mysterious patterns trampled into crops grown in southwest England.
Rosemary Rhodes, who has tried for more than four years to persuade others that wild cats prowl the moor, scoffed at the government's suggestion that the animals she has videotaped were domestic cats.
``I am just picking myself up off the floor from laughing,'' she said. ``I gave them footage of Twinkie, my cat. I zoomed in and I zoomed out, Twinkie looked nothing like the pumas I taped.''
Last year, Rhodes sold the last of her 50 sheep after four ewes were ripped to death.
Another moorlands resident, Ellis Daw, told Independent Television News that Wednesday's report was a government cover-up.
``I have seen puma. My friends have seen puma, my neighbors have seen puma,'' said Daw. ``We know they're here.''
Investigator Baker said it would have been impossible to confuse the beast with a domestic cat.
A puma or black panther is up to nine feet long and weighs up to 150 pounds, and has a tail longer than its body. Neither big cat exists in the wild in Britain.
Baker and Wilson analyzed videotapes and found ``the measurements and body proportion show that it has the same dimensions as an adult domestic black cat.''
by CNB