Reports of a large black cat in the Pentland Hills stretch back at least to 1997, when a cluster of sightings in the area prompted enough local interest to be documented on big-cat tracking sites, and have continued on and off since. One of the more recent, widely circulated reports came via a Facebook post from a resident near Penicuik describing a completely black animal roughly four times the bulk of an ordinary domestic cat, moving across open hillside.
The Scottish SPCA has acknowledged receiving numerous reports of this kind from the Pentlands over the years, generally forwarded on by concerned members of the public, but has stated it has never been able to independently confirm any of them. Britain has a long-running, low-level tradition of big-cat sightings of this general type going back to at least the 1960s and 70s, most famously the "Beast of Bodmin Moor" in Cornwall; the most commonly offered explanation is that some genuinely are escaped or deliberately released exotic pets from the period before the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 tightened private ownership rules, while others are very likely large domestic cats, dogs or other wildlife misjudged in scale or misidentified at a distance. As with the great majority of British big-cat reports, no DNA, clear photograph or other hard evidence specific to the Pentlands sightings has been independently verified, and the case is presented here as an honestly unconfirmed local tradition rather than an established fact.
Comments