The Alness Big Cat Attack on Pat MacLeod, Ardross Road (2008)

Alness is a small town in Easter Ross, in the Scottish Highlands. Big cat sightings were not new there. Attacks were. Then came December 2008.

Pat MacLeod, 74, lived on Ardross Road. The first time the animal came at her, she pulled up a dustbin as a shield. It came over the bin anyway. It seized her left leg and the top of her right arm. She was treated at Invergordon Hospital.

Several days later, still in bandages, she was outside her home putting out her bins. The cat was there again. According to the BBC, it sprang at her as soon as she made eye contact. She called it "shockingly strong". It "managed to drag her some distance", then quickly ran off.

She was left with deep cuts to her legs and cuts and scratches to her hands. She needed stitches in hospital. Her worry was for others. What would happen if a child met it?

Her description was precise. Grey, with a dark stripe down its back, a long tail, large paws and a broader face than a domestic cat. The BBC called it a 3ft-long cat. The Scotsman put it at about 4ft from nose to tail tip.

Northern Constabulary and Scottish Natural Heritage both set out to trace the animal. Police noted earlier big cat sightings in the area, but no previous attacks. An unprovoked attack, they said, would be "very uncharacteristic" of a Scottish wildcat. The animal might be a hybrid of a domestic and a feral cat. People were told not to approach or feed any "unusually large" cat.

Scottish Natural Heritage was blunt. "It would be a big surprise if this was a Scottish wildcat," a spokesman said. "It could be a hybrid, we want to know what it is and find it so it poses no further danger." No report has surfaced that the animal was ever caught or identified.

The official view leaned towards a hybrid. The Kellas cats of Moray, wildcat and domestic hybrids, one of them snared in 1984, are the closest real model. Another reading is a large, aggressive feral domestic cat, since both police and SNH ruled out a pure Scottish wildcat. On 29 December 2008 the BBC ran a later piece headlined "Expert tears into cat conspiracy". The Wikipedia article on British big cats lists Alness among claimed attacks in the UK, noting there is "no substantive evidence" that any of them involved a non-domestic cat.

Alness belongs to a long Highland thread. Felicity the puma, captured in Inverness-shire in 1980 and kept at the Highland Wildlife Park. Two lynx captured at Drumguish near Kingussie in January 2025, believed illegally released. Further afield, Karl Shuker recorded an attack by a large black mystery cat in the Cheviots in the summer of 1987.

What sets Alness apart is the witness. A named woman. Real wounds. An animal that came back a second time. And, as far as any report shows, was never caught.