The hype over suspected big cats at Woodchester Park reveals how we all need some wilderness in our tidy, civilised lives
Last month, samples were taken from a dead deer at Woodchester Park near Stroud, in the hope that the DNA would prove to be evidence of a big cat. The media got busy. The "Beast of Stroud," said the Mirror, while the Sun announced "Big cat has eaten three wallabies" a few miles from the dead deer. This week it was reported by the evolutionary geneticist who tested the samples that the deer was actually done to death by a not very alien fox. If you're disappointed, maybe you can do something with the notion of wild wallabies bouncing dangerously around the Cotswolds.
I don't think the English try hard enough. In Scotland they have thick-necked Nessie occasionally popping up from the prehistoric depths of her loch. The Indonesians knew about their nine-foot Komodo dragon long before it was first officially sighted in 1910. Canada has the hairy sasquatch, whose 24- by eight-inch paw prints regularly make the news. The Norwegians have their giant super-squid, the kraken, with tentacles large and powerful enough to crush a ship. And the English have … a big cat somewhere near Stroud. Our hankering for a wild, mysterious beast in our civilised midst is pretty suburban, although it gets a little more exciting when people likely to benefit from the PR describe them as "puma- or panther-type cats, even if they do add that they're talking quite small pumas or panthers".
There are so many believers in beasts in Bodmin or Stroud and other places, that the super-pussies have their own acronym: ABCs, emphasising that these alien big cats are from a long-ago time when nature ran wild, men draped in animal skins risked their lives to bring home the warthog, and Stroud was merely a glimmer in the Creator's eye. A little danger is important. The National Trust has issued a warning: "If anyone does see a big cat in the wild they are advised to stay composed and back away." Our atavistic longings are nicely encouraged by this. In spite of the paradox of a National Trust whose job it is to keep carefully managed nature showrooms neatly in the right places, their language encourages the idea of the wild. And we want the idea of wilderness and whatever it might once have harboured – just a little, and, when it comes to big cats, more of a sighting than a close encounter.
David Attenborough's nature epics have fed our need to feel that something is lurking in the shrubbery. Those bits at the end, showing how the filming was done, are becoming more interesting than the main show. The camera people look like old-fashioned heroes, albeit with incredibly intricate technology, who brave injury, death and even madness to get naturalistic-seeming pictures of exotic creatures and extreme landscapes most of us are unlikely to confront. Even if you spend an hour and a half every morning commuting from Stroud to London, you can dream. In fact, you'd better dream. And even if you're never going to explore a scorpion-infested bat cave in Borneo, or battle with a sabre-toothed tiger back in the mists of time, why not wonder about big cats camouflaged in the passing landscape?
Doubtless there are evolutionary psychologists who would claim that we are the carriers of genes adapted to staying alert for wild beasts jumping out at us, and that our regular sightings and belief in big cats are just Darwinian anachronisms. Freudians will know exactly what part of the family romance those wild cats really represent, while Jungians might suppose that the cats are just rather restrained English versions of the archetypal Other. All are probably true enough. In our tidy, civilised lives we still have space for Conrad's "the horror, the horror" and Henry James's "beast in the jungle", which turn out to be the terror and thrill we feel at the potential of our own murky interiors.
Jenny Diski is the author of What I Don't Know About Animals