According to the Southern Reporter of 24 December 2002, John Smith filmed a three minute video from his home in Cardrona on 13 December, of a large white animal about half a mile away that leapt onto a five foot wall and prowled along the dyke. He and his wife first took it for a sheep, and said all the other sheep had crowded into the far corner. Through binoculars he recognised a very large cat. The paper estimated four to five feet from tail to nose. Scottish Big Cats' Phil Crosby said it was definitely a cat, that he was stumped, and that even pumas as light as silvery grey are not pure white. A farmer nearby said his horses had been spooked the same weekend.
The paper noted more than twenty reports from the Tweed Valley that year, including a farmer's daughter's sighting on 26 June 2002 of a black cat slightly larger than her flat coated retriever, seen near the same place with sheep and a horse behaving in an agitated way. The archive suggests leucism as an explanation and adds that no large white cats had been reported in Scotland before. The distant video is the only visual evidence and I have not seen it.
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