I came across a report of the sighting of a Scottish wild cat on the BBC Scotland website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8657470.stm on 2nd May. According to the article there are around 400 pure wildcats and 3,500 hybrid wild cats believed to be in Scotland. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would suggest that these are only a part of the cat population.
Remarkably enough, Mull, off the west coast of Scotland, despite being an island with no fixed link to the Scottish mainland, has a track record of mystery big cat sightings, which I look at in my book, The Mystery Animals of the Western Isles.
Yes, it seems that even the sleepy island of Mull hasn’t failed to follow the rest of the country in reports of big cats, with the first sighting taking place in 1978 and the last reported sighting of a similar animal taking place fairly recently, one sighting being at Craignure, which just happens to be the location of Mull’s main ferry terminal.
How the big cats got to Mull might seem like a mystery. It has been suggested that the wildcat swam to the island as it was unlikely to have been prepared to travel on the Calmac ferry (I don’t know why not; as Scottish coastal ferry journeys go, it’s not that bad a trip).
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