GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: Bodies!

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

If there’s one thing that irritates me, it’s when sceptical folk who harp on about ‘big cats’ in the UK, say stupid things like, “If there are big cats out there, why haven’t I seen one ?”, or, “Where’s the evidence ?”, and, “Surely there’d be bodies ?”

Of course, if we rely on the evidence which the newspapers obtain then those sad little sceptics have every right to so ignorant, but I’ve always felt that as each year more than two-hundred people report to me sightings across the south-east, in court this would be good enough voice to condemn a person for a crime. And yes, there have been bodies, as chronicled in my new book MYSTERY ANIMALS OF THE BRITISH ISLES: KENT. Evidence is in abundance - sheep kills (sheep dragged up into trees) – bloody dogs and their trampolines!, paw-prints, faeces, and in my case, personal encounters and film footage.

I recently spoke to an old mate who told that around 2000 he’d been driving through the marshes at Romney one night when he clipped the back end of a black, Labrador-sized animal which resembled the cat he’d never believed in. I’ve known of incidents where black leopards have been splattered over the road (M25 near Surrey), written cars off (Dover), and cats have also been shot dead (Sheppey & Higham). Of course, sceptics, perched behind their PC’s all day want a body on their lap, but would it still be sufficient proof ? Of course, not, the idiot brigade would soon say, “Well, maybe it was just a one-off escapee.”

Predators such as the black leopard are extremely elusive, mainly hunting at night on dark, remote roads. Foxes and badgers certainly turn up as road kill, but how many of them are out there in comparison to large cats ?

Other strange animals have also turned up on the roads. The most fascinating case comes from 1980 when a motorist and passenger were travelling through East Kent, when suddenly an Indian nilgai antelope leapt a hedge and came crashing through the windscreen. Both witnesses were killed instantly. I even spoke to the mother of one of the men that was killed.

More known cases have turned up dead crocodiles in Wales, and also a pond in London. A strange lizard was also found dead in a road in the capital, a leopard cat was shot dead in 1988 at Devon and in 1981 fishermen from Aberdeenshire were amazed to find a dead elephant floating in the sea of the Scottish coast. And these sceptics want bodies….