The Hayling Island Jungle Cat

For decades, people across Britain have reported alien big cats. Very few exotic cats have ever actually been recovered. The Hayling Island cat is one of them, and it is often cited as hard physical evidence behind those reports.

July 1988. West Lane, Hayling Island, Hampshire. A car struck and killed a cat on the road. It was not a domestic cat. It was a swamp cat, Felis chaus, also called the jungle cat or reed cat.

Its range runs from Egypt across the Middle East to Asia. It is not native to Europe. No account from the driver survives in the sources. The exact day is not recorded. What survives is the animal itself.

The body was preserved. The first mount was not a success, and a 1995 newspaper photo shows it. In May 1997 taxidermist Mark Winston-Smith of Snitterfield remounted the cat, and Naish later judged this second mount excellent. The cat became accession HMCMS:Bi1997.14 in the Hampshire museum collection, now cared for by Hampshire Cultural Trust. It sits in a research store at Chilcomb House, Winchester, not open to the public.

January 2009. Darren Naish visited the store with the Southampton Natural History Society. Dr Chris Palmer, senior keeper of natural sciences, gave access. Naish noted prominent striping near the elbow, indistinct striping elsewhere, a short coat and a short, slender tail. The colouring suggested a pale, tropical population rather than a temperate one.

Naish returned in March 2013. Senior keeper Christine Taylor allowed him to take hair samples for ongoing work on the UK's exotic cat fauna. No results have been published. His write-up was reposted on Tet Zoo on 23 March 2022. Naish notes that the case has never been reported in the peer-reviewed literature.

Around 2016 the cat went on public display for the first time, on a one-year loan to The Spring arts and heritage centre in Havant. Manager Sophie Fullerlove said the venue was delighted to bring it into the collection.

Nobody disputes the carcass or the species. The debate is about how it got there. Naish calls British jungle cats escapees from collections. Kate Saunders, heritage manager at The Spring, suggested it escaped from someone's private collection, and that feral animals like it could account for some big cat sightings. The museum record still calls its origin a mystery.

The species did live in Britain in the Pleistocene, but there is no evidence it survived into the Holocene. Hybrids with domestic cats, known as chausies, are fertile, and hybrid-looking cats near Ludlow raised the idea of jungle cats breeding in the wild. Naish also argues that some British big cat reports may really be jungle cats, larger than domestic cats and easily mistaken for pumas or lynxes.

Jungle-cat-like animals were reported on Hayling Island before 1988. The museum record says later sightings suggest at least one other animal may still be at large on the island. In 1989 a second dead jungle cat turned up near Ludlow, Shropshire. Karl Shuker bought that specimen and still owns it. Alongside Felicity the puma, captured in Inverness-shire in 1980, and a Canadian lynx shot in Devon now kept in Bristol, the Hayling Island cat belongs to a short list of real bodies behind Britain's mystery cats.