The Ludlow jungle cat (Richards Castle, 1989)

Britain has a long tradition of big cat sightings. What it rarely has is a body.

Richards Castle is a village on the B4361, straddling the border between Shropshire and Herefordshire, south of Ludlow. In the mid-1980s, a cat was reportedly first sighted close to Leintwardine, a few miles west. No first-hand account of those sightings has surfaced.

February 1989. A Mr Evans of Richards Castle found a dead cat. The Shropshire Star dates the discovery to February 3, 1989, and says it lay on the roadside. It was no ordinary cat. It was an Asian jungle cat, Felis chaus, also called the swamp or reed cat.

The animal was thin. It had back injuries. Together they suggested a quiet end. Hit by a car. Unable to feed. Starved. In size it was, as the Star later put it, "actually, not much larger than a domestic moggie."

The body went to Ludlow Museum, where it was identified. Local vet Gareth Thomas examined, measured and photographed it there. There was no formal government inquiry. The conclusion reached was simple: "it was thought that the jungle cat was probably an escapee from some private collection which had been injured by a car."

Mr Evans had the cat stuffed and mounted in a glass case. Zoologist and cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker, then finishing Mystery Cats of the World, later bought it "after contacting the relevant authorities to ensure that it was legal". Shuker called the specimen "clearly either an escapee or a deliberate release from captivity" and noted that its "origin has never been determined." Today it is "in storage" at an undisclosed location.

Soon after the find, a woman brought two kittens, George and Jasper, to Gareth Thomas's surgery. She had bought them from a farm in Leintwardine. According to the Star, Thomas "was startled to see that they looked very similar to the jungle cat, and Jasper in particular was much larger than other kittens of his age." He came to believe their mother, "a grey feral domestic cat with lynx-like features", was a daughter of the jungle cat.

Shuker treated several animals in the Ludlow area that looked like hybrids as evidence, writing about them in Fortean Times and elsewhere. Jungle cat and domestic hybrids are real, and fertile. But the question was never settled. As the Star noted, "genetic testing to prove it one way or the other would have been prohibitively expensive".

Not everyone liked the label. Naturalist Mr Lawrence pointed out that "A jungle cat is about a fifth of the size of a lion". The likeliest ordinary reading of the kittens is that they were simply large domestic cats. And DEFRA's general position on British big cats is that "while there has been the occasional escape from zoos or illegal ownerships, there is no evidence of a breeding population."

Nobody has questioned that the body is real. The Shropshire Star has called it "the one and only proven-beyond-doubt case of a big cat in Shropshire". Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology places it beside the Hayling Island jungle cat, killed by a car in Hampshire in July 1988, and suggests some British big cat sightings may really be jungle cats. He adds a caution: "none of this has been reported in the peer-reviewed literature."