The man who captured this image of a creature near his home at night reckons it is the first photo of the Beast of Cumbria.
Roy Jackson is convinced it is the big cat that numerous people have reported spotting in the area in recent years. The retired civil engineer says that, judging by what else is in the photo, the animal on the wall is about 3ft 9in long. Roy, 73, set up an infra-red motion-activated camera after an encounter as he walked his dog using a torch to pick his way in the dark.
He said: “It was unmistakably a big cat – it was enormous. It was a short distance from me, about 30 to 40 yards. I could tell it wasn’t a dog or a domestic cat.” Determined to get proof, he installed the camera next to his farmhouse in Gatebeck, and only had to wait two days.
The picture of the big cat (© Glen Minikin)Roy said: “The picture came as no shock to me. I knew what I’d seen. I wasn’t drunk.” Since 2003 police have had over 40 reports of a black panther or puma in the countryside on the southern edge of the Lake District park. The British Big Cat Society attributes the Beast of Cumbria to big cats being sold as pets until the mid-1970s.
Specialist tracker Rhoda Watkins has been investigating the existence of big cats in the UK for two decades, and has seen plenty of evidence out in the field - from leopard footprints to bones hacked by puma teeth. But up until now, there was no DNA evidence of big cats roaming the British countryside - that was until Rhoda's team recently found irrefutable evidence of a leopard in the countryside near Gloucestershire.
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"I've been investigating sightings for 20 years now and there's been a lot of trackers before me. I have seen plenty of evidence out in the field. But this DNA find absolutely, conclusively proves it. It's what we've been looking for," Rhoda told the Mirror of the leopard hair they found stuck on a farmer's fence.
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