British big cats

In British folklore and urban legend, British big cats refers to the subject of reported sightings of non-native, wild big cats in the United Kingdom. Many of these creatures have been described as "panthers", "pumas" or "black cats".

There have been rare isolated incidents of recovered individual animals, often medium-sized species like the Eurasian lynx, though in one 1980 case, a puma was captured alive in Scotland. These are generally believed to have been escaped or released exotic pets that were held illegally, possibly released after the animals became too difficult to manage or after the introduction of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976.

The existence of a population of "true big cats" in Britain, however, especially a breeding population, has been rejected by experts and the British government owing to a lack of convincing evidence for the presence of these animals. Supposed sightings made from a distance have been mostly written off as domestic cats close to the subject being misidentified as a larger animal sighted further away. One folklorist considered such sightings of creatures to be a "media artifact" driven by British journalistic practices in the 1970s and 1980s while another described it as the result of a situation where "media-generated interest encourages rumour, misinterpretation, and exaggeration".

A medieval Welsh poem Pa Gwr in the Black Book of Carmarthen mentions a Cath Palug, meaning "Palug's cat" or "clawing cat", which roamed Anglesey until slain by Cei. In the Welsh Triads, it was the offspring of the monstrous sow Henwen.

The New Forest folktale of the Stratford Lyon tells of how John de Stratford pulled a giant, red, antlered lion from the ground at South Baddesley in the New Forest in the year 1400. The story is first recorded in the marginalia of an 18th-century bible. In the late 20th century, sightings of the lion were recorded in the vicinity of the Red Lion Pub, Boldre.^{[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. Later, in New Brunswick, he saw a "lucifee" (Canada lynx) " and it seemed to me to be just such a cat as I had seen at Waverley."

Since the early 2000s, there have been several claims by individuals in different parts of the UK of having suffered attacks by supposed big cats, though to date there is no substantive evidence proving these were in fact attacks by a non-domestic species of cat. Such claims include that of an eleven-year-old boy in Monmouthshire, a man in southeast London, a 74-year-old woman in the Scottish Highlands, and a man in Cornwall.

Phantom big cats have also formed the basis of several local urban legends within the United Kingdom where unexplained animal deaths, typically livestock, would be blamed on such imagined creatures, like the Beast of Bodmin Moor and the Cotswolds Big Cat. The search for physical "evidence" to support these claims has typically been found to have far more ordinary and less sensational origins. In the case of the Beast of Bodmin, when a skull found in the River Fowey was presented to the Natural History Museum as proof of its existence, it was found to have been cut from a leopard skin rug, while in the case of the Cotswolds Big Cat, the only predator DNA that was found was of foxes.