Felicity, the Cannich Puma (Kerrow Farm, Glen Affric, 1980)

For about two years, something was killing livestock in Glen Affric. At Kerrow Farm, near Cannich and some 12 miles west of Loch Ness, Donald "Ted" Noble kept finding animals, mostly sheep, savaged and with their bones crushed.

The first warning had come earlier. 1976. Jessie Chisholm, an elderly neighbour in Tomich, reported an encounter with a big black cat. Over the following years came several more reports of different big cats, seen and heard around the forest near the cottage. Other local people reported sightings too.

Then Ted Noble saw it. A "lioness or similar member of the big cat family", stalking the farm's Shetland ponies. Police conducted unsuccessful initial searches. Nothing was found.

So the farmer built a steel cage. Accounts differ on the bait. Sheep's offal. Fresh meat every day. A sheep's head dangling from a rope at the entrance. They differ on the place, too. The museum says the trap stood on Jessie Chisholm's grounds. Another account puts it near the farm.

29 October 1980. The trap held. Inside was a 5ft female puma, fully grown and very much alive. The Northern Constabulary photographed her behind the bars. The story went national. One headline read "Grrr-eat Scot! Farmer Ted Catches the Loch Ness Lion!" Rival tabloids ran "Grrr!" and "Miaow".

The puma was not what anyone expected. Experts found her obese, contented and unexpectedly tame, roaming wild for less than 48 hours. Eddie Orbell, director of the Highland Wildlife Park, said she "had never spent as long as 30 minutes in the wild". She let experts pet her behind her ears. The park took her in and named her Felicity. Keeper Donald Mitchell often walked with her slung across the shoulders. Within days she was playing with the keeper's children. She would not eat unskinned rabbits, which the museum calls further evidence that she had been hand-reared and was unlikely to be the cause of the livestock predation.

Felicity died in January 1985. The autopsy put her age at about 20 and confirmed hand-rearing and overfeeding in youth. Edinburgh taxidermist Philip Howard mounted her. Since 1986 she has stood in Inverness Museum and Art Gallery.

Hoax talk started early. Some eyewitnesses said they had seen a puma in a cage being driven around the area in a pick-up truck. The Inverness Courier later wrote of suspicion centred on one particular journalist, though no proof was ever forthcoming. Ted Noble denied any hoax, and Bob High of the Farmers' Union stood by the farmer.

The explanation most sources favour is an escaped or dumped pet, perhaps released after the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976. But that answers only half the question. A tawny puma did not match the big black cat Jessie Chisholm described. And the sightings and killings continued after the capture.

Felicity remains probably the most famous big cat capture in the UK. Di Francis covered the case in Cat Country in 1983. In 1995 she featured in Of Monsters and Miracles, an exhibition by Croydon Museums with Fortean Times. Her true origins remain a mystery. So does the black cat of Glen Affric.